Forum Discussion

CCWW's avatar
CCWW
Level 4
10 years ago

After library reboot all tape media is shown as "cleaning tape"

Our HP MSL rebooted unexpectedly over night. After the reboot all the jobs failed due to no media being available. When I checked the media in Backup Exec I found all the media was moved from their media sets to the Cleaning Media media set and all the tapes were marked as tape media.

Rebooting did nothing to change the issue. Inventorying the media didn't change anything. The only way I could resolve the issue was to re-catalog each of the tapes. After that I had to move them back into their media sets and backups are now running fine.

Just wondering how a library reboot could cause such an issue.

 

 

15
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Windows Server (2003-2008)

8 Replies

Sort By
  • Larry_Fine's avatar
    Larry_Fine
    Level 6
    10 years ago

    BE marks a cartridge as a cleaning cartridge if BE places the cartridge in a tape drive and the tape drive doesn't respond that a usable data tape is in the drive within a few minutes.  I would speculate that something weird happned before or soon after the reboot where the tape drives were not working properly.  Do you know why the library rebooted?  Was it a power failure?

    I am surprised that an inventory job didn't sort things out.  Does the inventory job log show these as cleaning tape or as data tapes?  You might have just been able to delete the fake cleaning tape bar codes from the BE database (Storage View | Tape Media | Cleaning Media) and then run another inventory job.  But since the catalog job fixed things, I think you are good to go.

  • CCWW's avatar
    CCWW
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    The cause of the reboot is unknown. HP support could not determine the cause. It wasn't power related as nothing else that is connected to the same PDU was affected in any way. When I did the inventory it inventoried the media as cleaning tapes. If the issue does happen again I plan to delete all the media, re-inventory and catalog them. I may open a case with Symantec support just so they can review the logs and determine why it felt the need to switch every tape to a cleaning tape. Could just be a condition they never accounted for in the program and might be a bug they could fix.

  • CCWW's avatar
    CCWW
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    Happened again this morning after manually rebooting the library. For whatever reason, Backup Exec switches all media to Cleaning Tapes when we reboot the library. All the Backup Exec services were stopped prior to the reboot. I was hoping that would help avoid any issue. No media was mounted after the library restarted, the media just somehow changed to cleaning tapes.

  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    10 years ago

    Does the MSL have the latest firmware installed? If you disable Backup Exec completely and reboot the library, does it still mark the tapes as cleaning if you log onto Command View?

    Thanks!

  • Larry_Fine's avatar
    Larry_Fine
    Level 6
    10 years ago

    For whatever reason, Backup Exec switches all media to Cleaning Tapes when we reboot the library. All the Backup Exec services were stopped prior to the reboot. I was hoping that would help avoid any issue. No media was mounted after the library restarted, the media just somehow changed to cleaning tapes.

    That is very weird.  Did you wind up with double entries in the BE database for all the tapes that were in the library at the time?  I am wondering if BE magically changed them to cleaning tapes or created new cleaning tapes (with the same bar codes as your data tapes)?

    Rebooting the server (when you would have restarted the BE services) may be a possible workaround.  But I am curious why this is happening.

  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    10 years ago

    ...you might also want to open up BEutility.exe and run a repair of the BEDB. 

    Thanks!

  • CCWW's avatar
    CCWW
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    Happened again overnight. This time only some of the tape media was changed to cleaning tapes anything that was changed to cleaning tape is no longer in the media set it should be.

    Not sure why only some media was changed to cleaning tape and some was not.

    Collecting logs with the Veritas tool. The last engineer I worked with said they can't open the logs created with the Symantec tool.

     

  • Danna_zhang's avatar
    Danna_zhang
    Level 2
    10 years ago

    Hi every one,

    I am Danna and I am new here.

    currently I got some issue with Symantec BE software, our media drive is using overland NEO Series, which had two drive inside, in this morning when I check tape drive I found there has a media in it, but at that moment no job was running, then I tried to move the media to a empty slot faild with error code click resume to make it work, I also found our daily job just losing one, we usually have two backup jobs from monday to friday. is there some one has same issue with me? thanks for contact me.