BackupExec 12 (SP3) Showing all tapes as Cleaning Tapes

[acl03]

We are running an HP MSL5026 tape library with two DLT drives. I changed tapes last Friday (as I do every week) and marked all the newly inserted tapes (tapes had been used before) as scratch. When i came in today, All the tapes in the library other than 2 are marked as type Cleaning, so my jobs did not run, as they could not find available tapes.

When I try to move them to the "Scratch" media set, I get no errors, but the media set does not change, they stay "Cleaning". (See attached screenshot)

Any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks.

[Jeff_Allen]

I had this same problem when a job was running and BE would lose connection to the tape library (Quantum Superloader in my case) which was due to the server rebooting because of Windows Updates overnight. Once that was resolved all I had to do was power cycle the library, then restart the BE services and inventory the tapes... hopefully this helps in your case...

It also could be that the drive is not able to read the begining of the tape and therefore thinks the tape is a cleaning tape. Have you tried cleaning the drives a couple times manually?

[acl03]

I tried "deleting" the tapes that were incorreclty marked as cleaning. When I re-scanned the slots, they showed up as scratch again.  It appears that we are ok for now.

Any clues as to why this would happen?

[acl03]

Well I take back being "ok" for now. Even the diff job last night caused the same thing. One of them worked (only needed 1 tape) and the other job is now waiting for tapes, since they are all marked as cleaning again.

Jeff, I will try power cycling the library and cleaning the drives manually. Thanks.

[Ken_Putnam]

See  http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/306218.htm

Also in previous versions, if the drives were higher on the SCSI chain than the library, this could happen

[acl03 · Accepted solution]

I figured this out, it was simply a bad drive. The drive did not detect a header on a tape, so BackupExec assumed they were cleaning tapes. Replaced the faulty drive, and we're all set now. Thanks for the advice, guys.