New tapes ruined by faulty tape drive

[Zvonimir_Magoc]

Hi all,

I had some problems with HP backup drive recently. My backups were failing with ‘bad media’ or ‘inconsistent data’ errors. I have number of tapes that showed hardware errors after the data was written to them. Some of the tapes were hardly used or brand new.

HP replaced the drive and my backups are working fine again – problem was with the hardware.

I have moved all media with ‘hard errors’ to Retired Media exported the tapes and deleted the tape objects from Retired Media container.

My question is, is it possible to somehow reuse these tapes? Can I for example re-label and ‘long format’ them? Will they still keep ‘hard errors’ somewhere on the area that is not accessible by formatting process? What is the best method of reintroducing the tapes in the scenario like this?

We use BE10.1 on W2K3.

Thanks in advance,

[Ken_Putnam]

Most modern tape drives do not permit Long Formatting

If the errors were caused by faulty hardware, not the tape media itself,  you should be able to inventory and label, adn then use them as if they were new,

Keep an eye on them for the first use, but you should be fine

[Zvonimir_Magoc]

Thanks Ken.