Medium Removal Prevented
Hello, I'm having ongoing issues with tapes getting stuck in an MSL6000 library. They're not getting stuck because they're damaged or because the drives need cleaning but rather that something is issuing the Prevent Removal instruction (I'm seeing in this in the Master (and Robotic controller) server's messages file), this happens with any tape on any of the 6 drives in the library. It also doesn't happen every day, sometimes it'll do it 3 days in a row, and then won't do it at all for 4 days, despite that we run the same backups every night.
Most of the tapes in question (I'd guess at 90%) have the same media owner, a Windows 2k3 media server running NBU 6.5.5, however this was also happening when this box was running 6.0mp5, so the upgrade hasn't made any difference, however the other 10% come from two other Windows 2k boxes still running 6.0MP5. This is much rarer though.
I've seen advice suggesting using the "allow" command in robtest but this makes no difference, you still can't remove the tape using robtest even after issuing that, the only way of removing the tape is to physically open the door on the library and press the eject button on the drive.
I can see the odd error in the Event log for the media server complaining about DIRECTORY INVALID ON UNLOAD on some tapes, however it's never one of the tapes that gets stuck, so I think that's a side issue. Most of this media is getting on a bit now (it's LTO3), however as the customer is intending to replace this robot after March with LTO5 libraries I'm not going to be able to get them to buy any new media.
Any ideas?
Also remember with Windows 2003 servers that you need Removable Storage Service stopped and disabled as well as adding the Tape Unit Ready AutoRun key with a value of 0 - otherwise Windows itself will be the cause:
