Some - not all - of my tapes are showing as "Cleaning Media"

[John_Bonaccorso]

Before someone smacks me in th eface, I've read http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH61720.  None of the "causes" listed are applicable.  ALl of my tapes are good, verified. All of my tape drives are good, verified.  Bar code rules aren't even enabled.

Not all of the media is showing as "Cleaning Media" but a lot of them are - roughly 50% of the tapes in the SL500 are.  Attempts to move the tapes from the "Cleaning Media" media set to either "retired" or a real backup media set show sucessful but the tapes never move.  They remain in the "cleaning media" media set.  The only thing that will actually move them out is an inventory of the slot they are in.  I'd really like to know what is causing this.  It happens ever so often and is a PITA to come into on a Friday morning when I need to get my tapes exported and ready for transport offiste to find out the none of my Thursday night diffs ran because BE thought it had no media to write to.

[Jaydeep_S]

What Library are you using. Have you tried running the Dignostic utilities that are available from the Hardware Vendor.

Hope you have confirmed if the Robotic Library is supported as per HCL and all the drivers and firmware has been updated. Also, it is connected using a RAID adapter.

In the Windows event viewer are you seeing in event id 7, 9, 11, 13. If possible post the adamm log as an attachment.

[John_Bonaccorso]

OK, I found the attach button.  Sorry, new to this forum and it was off screen.  I've attached the adamm.log

[John_Bonaccorso]

Will answer questions in the order they were asked:

1. StorageTek SL500. 
2. yes
3. yes, yes, no it is FC.  Side note, this is not a new library nor are the drives in it.  Library has been in use since 2008 and drives were upgraded from LTO2 to LTO4 in 2011.  This issue recently began and no changes have been made - yet.  We plan to migrate from our Brocade switch to a new Nexus switch in two weeks.
4. Event ID 11 - only - informational text:"Broadcom BCM5708C #84: Network controller configured for 1Gb full-duplex link." adamm.log is huge and I don't have the option of "attaching it.  Wouldn't want to paste that much text in this reply. 

Thanks in advance for any assistance/advice you can give.

[Jaydeep_S]

The log has a bunch of recent errors pointing to the Medium Changer.

ERROR = 0xE000820A (E_CHG_HARDWARE)

ERROR = 0xE0008114 (E_PVL_CHANGER_NOT_AVAILABLE)

This technote should help in identifying. http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH89750

If there is a daignostic self test available on the library, try to powercycle it and run the tool.

[John_Bonaccorso]

Few things I forgot to mention, not sure if it makes a difference.  This is a CASO/SSO environment with 3 MMS servers.  While investigating this issue, I stopped all the services on the 3 MMS servers and canceled all jobs on the main media server.  One drive had a tape stuck in in so I had to stop services on the main media server while one remaining job finished.  With all services stopped, I power cycled the SL500 and once it was reinitialized, I ejected the tape manually and closed the door.  Once it was ready, I restarted all services and "on-lined" the drive.  I've since begun a full inventory of all tapes in the library, all six drives are in use and performing the job admirably and one-by-one the tapes are being put back into the proper media set.  What I'm interested in though is what caused it in the first place.   The errors you are citing from the log were all between 05/29 and 06/25 and were cleared on each event.  What I'm talking about happened between yesterday and today.

[John_Bonaccorso]

Ahh... and one more observation that may help.  As these tapes are being put back into their correct media set, a new GUID is being assigned to it and an orphan instance is being left in the the cleaning media media set. with no location where as before inventory showed it was in the library. 

[Larry_Fine]

So, you are basically ending up with duplicate entries in the BE GUI?  Meaning two entries with the same bar code? 

One (dead) bar code stays in the cleaning media set forever (until deleted) and the other bar code is in the proper media set and usable?

If so, that sounds like BE is having some read issues and therefore perceives the cartridge as being "new to BE" so it creates another entry in the BE database for it.  BE allows duplicate bar codes.  BE actually keeps track of things with the Media GUID.  Are you seeing two tapes witht eh same GUID?