Unknown media

[Barbara_Dobbs]

I need some assitance. Our tape backup unit went bad and we purchased the exact same unit. However, my tapes are coming up as 'Unknown media'. I have inventoried them and that is successful but, it still comes up as unknown.

I have uninstall the device driver, reinstalled it, restarted the machine several times and no luck.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can get this new unit to recognized my tapes?

We have Windows 2003 server and Backup Exec 10.0

Thank you

[Keith_Langmead]

Try either removing all trace of the old tape drive from within Backup Exec, or installing the replacement tape drive as a completely new drive, so for instance where you may have had the old one installed as HP1, install the new one as HP2.

While the replacement may have been identical a lot of tham have various ID's etc within them which are specific to each drive and which Backup Exec is aware of, so won't properly see it as the same drive (though normally that will cause the drive to go off-line).

Alternatively, the other possibility I've heard of in the past (though not so much recently so newer tapes might not suffer from it), is that when a tape drive gets old the heads can go out of alignment, or become damaged or something, such that the tapes which are used in at the same time are altered at the same time. While that drive and those tapes will work together, trying to use them in a new drive will fail. Might be worth trying some new tapes and seeing if the drive will read them properly or not so you can determine if the problem is with the drive or the tapes.

[shweta_rege]

Hello,


Could you please Update us on the issue?



Thank You,

Shweta

[Barbara_Dobbs]

We have tried several things and what we have found is the the backup unit that we received was damaged. We are trying other tape backup units to get this to work.

Sorry I did not get back to the forum sooner. This has gotten really frustrating and we are going to get away from tape drives and go with external hard drives for our backup needs with the Backup Exec software.

[Barbara_Dobbs]

Keith,

I did try this and we found out that the backup unit was damaged yet again. We are getting away from tapes and going with external hard drives.

[Keith_Langmead]

Thanks for the update Barbara, wow that's a run of bad luck!

Having gone from tape to hard drives and now back to tape at two of our sites the one thing I would mention is that assuming you'll be removing the hard drives to take them off-site, they can be prone to failing after while. We found that the life span of several of the disks was much shorter than we'd expected, which we attributed to them being moved around so much.

If you don't intend to take them off-site then you should keep in mind that you will loose the benefits afforded from the disaster recovery side of things from being able to keep the tapes away from your server(s).