Not Appendable (End Maker Unreadable) on new tapes

[Brandon_Johnson]

I have recently had most of my tapes be marked as "Not Appendable (End Maker Unreadable)". I have tried new tapes and had the same issue. I know I do not have bad tapes because I have used the Sony drive utility to format and write to the tapes without any problem. I have gotten a couple of tapes to work by completely removing them from the Media list and then re-adding them to my media sets. However, I am starting to miss a lot of jobs because of this problem. All my jobs are set to "Append to Media, overwrite if no appendable media is available." Any and all help would be appreciated. I am using BE 10.0 rev 5484 SP4.

[Ken_Putnam]

New or newly relabled, or quick erased tapes are NOT appendable in Veritas speak

To be appendalbe, a tape must have an active backup set on it, but be in the same media set as the on specified in the job, and must be with the APP defined for that media set.

You setting of "Append, Else Overwrite" should still work, as long as the tapes are not overwrite protected

[Brandon_Johnson]

I have had all my jobs set this way for years now. It seems like this problem is related to upgrading from Service Pack 3 to 4. I never had issues like this before. Thanks.

[Claude_Sturman]

I am having the same problem. My version is 10.0 rev5520. Brand new tapes that are in Scratch Media. This has happened on about 6 SDLT320 tapes out of a box of 20. No recent Veritas patches have been installed.

Claude

[Brandon_Johnson]

I used Sony's TapeTool to verify all tapes were good. I went ahead and formatted the tapes using the tool and deleted them each out of BU's media pool. Then I ran an inventory job to list all tapes as scratch media. I know the tapes are good. Is Veritas going to fix their software????

[Rucha_Abhyankar]

Hello Brandon,


Where can you see these tapes as not appenndable?

What is the overwrite protection period and the append period of the media set to which these tapes belong to?


What options have you configured in Tools>Options>Media management.


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[Rucha_Abhyankar]

Hi Brandon,


Where can you see that the tapes are not appendable?


What is the overwrite protection period period and append period of the media set to which these tapes belong?

What options have you configured under tools>options>media management?


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NOTE : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked assumed answered and would be moved to answered questions pool.

[Brandon_Johnson]

Where can you see that the tapes are not appendable?
--On the Devices View...Under Appendable Until. It says "Not Appendable (End Marker Unreadable)"


What is the overwrite protection period period and append period of the media set to which these tapes belong?
--The Overwrite protection period is 40 hours. The Append period is 1 week.

What options have you configured under tools>options>media management?
--Media Overwrite protection level is "Partial..." with Prompt checked. Media overwrite options is "Overwrite scratch media before....". Media label configuration is : Media Type 4MM, Prefix 4MM, Next Value 1, and Digits 6. Empty on Backup to Disk.

[Deepali_Badave]

Hello,

You can upgrade to BE v10.1.

Symantec Backup Exec (tm) 10d rev. 5629 for Windows Servers Installation Files

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/279332.htm

NOTE : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked assumed answered and would be moved to answered questions pool.

[Brandon_Johnson]

So what is this version going to do to me? I have read where users are having problems with Exchange backups being too slow among others. Show me the link to the document that says this version fixes my issue. Thank you.

Brandon

[Brandon_Johnson]

OK...any Symantec techs out there? I installed 10.1d. Same problems. What now?

[ray_littlefie1]

Not Appendable (End Maker Unreadable) often means the job is stopping abruptly. This could be caused by the job engine service stopping/restarting, rebooting the server in the middle of a backup, SCSI timeout, something thats suddenly stops the flow of data to the tape.

Then tape becomes not appendable, becuase there is no marker on tape that says 'backup job xxx' stops here. This is what a new job seeks for when it appends to the tape.

I would look at the job logs and the System log for the root of the problem...

[Brandon_Johnson]

Thanks Ray. I thought of that. I have no errors in any event logs about lost communication, job engine stopping/restarting, etc. The tapes just end up having End Marker Unreadable on them. I will say that it seems to only be happening on my bigger jobs, since my smaller jobs all seem to append to one of the tapes that I have Quick Erased via Sony's software.

[ray_littlefie1]

Are the backup jobs successful? If you where to right-mouse click on one of these tapes, and choose 'restore', do you see a red 'X' at the top of the selection list?


...You indicated that things where working well until the SP upgrade. Please post the Sony tape drive model and the block & buffer size (found by right mouse clicking the tape drive within the configuration tab.

[Brandon_Johnson]

on my smaller jobs, they are successful appending to a tape. On my bigger jobs that can take a tape and a half by themselves, they are not. It is almost like the Overwrite function is not working properly.

Ok, so on the tapes that have End Marker Unreadable, I have a red stop sign (basically telling me it was incomplete I believe) on some of the servers that I know failed...but the others look good.

Both of my tape drives are Sony SDX-700C. Block and buffer are both 64k.

Thanks for working with me Ray.

Brandon

[Howie_Chua]

Hello All,

Same problem here.

We have been running BE 10 SP 1 for more than a year now and have no problem until we upgraded to SP4 about one week ago. Suddenly some of our medias were marked as "Not Appendable (End Marker Unreadable). Neither moving those medias to scratch media, quick erase or long erase could make them usable again.
I have upgraded to BE 10d after talking to Veritas tech. No help either.

[Steve_Meek]

You might check and see if you have Data Execution Protection enabled. If your server is 2003 and has DEP enabled for all apps, it could be shutting your backups down.

Requires you to restart server.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352

Steve

[Brandon_Johnson]

Steve,

Thanks, that was a good idea. I fixed my own problem already. Should have closed this, sorry. The actual problem was that one of my tape drives was bad. It was corrupting the tapes. I disabled the drive one night and found that my backups actually worked, so I tried the next week with the other drive (bad drive) enabled and my jobs did not work. Replaced the drive and have not had any issues since. Thanks for nothing Symantec. I appreciate all your help!

[Brandon_Johnson]

Did like most people out here, figured it out without Symantec help. What do they do again?

[Russ_Perry]

Brandon Johnson writes: "The actual problem was that one of my tape drives was bad. It was corrupting the tapes"... "Thanks for nothing Symantec. I appreciate all your help!"

...you are upset that Symantec support did resolve your hardware issue?!? Backup Exec reported the problem as being the end of data marker being unreadable which seems fairly accurate to me. Some background: When a backup job is running, all tapes are considered to be in this status; not appendable, end marker unreadable. Once the job wraps up, the last order of business is to write an end of data marker on the tape so Backup Exec knows where to go to begin an append job. As a previous responder stated, if the job is prematurely aborted by service shutdown or server reboot, the end of data marker won't be written.

Russ