Problem With New Tapes

[e_tully]

To Whom It May Concern,

My company currently uses a Quantum DLT-V4 tape drive for nightly backups that occur every Monday through Friday.  Last month (June), Backup Exec sent an email saying that the tape that was used was at "end of life".  As the month went on, each tape that was used (except for Thursday night) would have the same email message.  The backup would run without any problems.

On July 1, my company received new tapes for the tape drive after a 3 week backorder delay.  I put a tape in on July 1st after it was labeled but the backup would not run.  Backup Exec gave an error message saying that there were multiple tape errors.  It also said that the tape drive needed to be cleaned.  I cleaned the tape drive and tried other new tapes over the weekend (July 2-3) but nothing worked.  I finally put in the old "Friday" tape and it backed up without any problems.

I have tried all of the new tapes but they do not work.  I talked with Quantum who sent 2 more tapes to see if the tapes were a "bad batch".  Tape number 1 from Quantum gave the same error messages as the tapes I had received on July 1st.  I haven't tried tape 2 yet.

What am I doing wrong that would make the tape drive not use the new tapes?  Is there some setting in Backup Exec I am missing?

Thank you,

Elizabeth Tully

[AmolB]

How often you run the cleaning job, its a good practice to schedule a cleaning job once a week.

Tape drive header tends to go bad due to read & write activity which creates bad blocks on the tapes.

Check the properties of the tapes, make sure there are hard read/write errors on the tapes.

Perform quick erase of the tapes which are showing errors. Also run live update and install all the latest

updates of Backup Exec. Once the updates are install, update the tape device drivers.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi Elizabeth,

Check for Hard Write Errors under the Device tab --> your tape drive. If there are HWEs showing, download the Quantum tape utility and run the tests against the drive...if they confirm a fault, you've got to replace the drive.

THanks!