Tape media suddenly becomes incompatible

[travesty]

Every week I take out and put tapes in our tape library.  Following that I run an inventory within Backup Exec.  The inventory job failed and it pointed to one of the tapes saying it was incompatible.  Nothing had changed with this tape and no changes were made within Backup Exec.  This is the error I receive: e000821e - Library error - incompatible storage media detected in robotic library.

We don't have barcode rules, so I've ruled that out.  Does anybody have any suggestions?

[Ken_Putnam]

You tapes may be degrading

How old are they?  Do you keep them in an climate controlled storage?

To reuse them, you should be able to re-label them, if they are not completely bad.

[travesty]

The tape in question was purchased in the summer of 2010.  They are in a HP MSL4048 within a rack, within a data center that has temperature controls.

[VJware]

have you looked at - http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH89508 ...there are usually 3 common reasons for this error

[pkh]

Have you taken a look at the number of read/write errors of your tapes?  If there are a lot of errors, then it could be

1) the batch of tapes is bad.

2) the tape drive is faulty.  Run the HP LT&T utility against the tape drive.  Stop all the BE services beforehand and select the write test.