unable to use tapes

[JJ]

Greetings,

I have masses of tapes that have been used in the past on previous versions of backup exec that i have tried to erase and re-use with this version, however veritas will not allow me to erase or reuse them. I have been assured there was no overwrite protection set.

I can inventory, catalogue, relabel, but not quick or long erase.

Any suggestions welcome, got a lot of useless tapes here.

Thanks

James

[Ken_Putnam]

What kind of tapes are they?

What kind of device do you have?

What kind of device were they recorded on?  Were you using hardware or software compression when they ere recorded ?

Have you tried using RSM to "prepare" these tapes?  see http://support.veritas.com/docs/255492

[JJ]

We have 2 types of tapes and drives.

Imation 40/80 DLTtape IV used in an IBM DLT5 40/80 dlt drive

Compaq Super DLTTape 1 110/220 used in Compaq SDLT 220 Drive

I cant say if at the time these tapes were used whether or not compression was used, however, i dont believe at that time enough data was being backed up to need compression.

I cant use the RSM method to wipe the tapes as i run 2003 server, unless you know a way around it?

James

[Ken_Putnam]

The RSM method should work for W2K3 also

[kgort]

I don't if this applies to your tape drives, but I recently ran into a similar problem with my DLT IV tapes.  I changed my tape libraries from DLT-7000 based to DLT1 based.  This allowed me to keep using my DLT IV tapes but gave me a little more storage capacity.  I discovered, much to my surprise, that in order to use the DLT IV tapes in the new DLT1 tape library I would have to BULK ERASE them.  It seems that although both drives use the same tapes, the older drives wrote a much stronger magnetic field to the tapes than the new one.  You could read the old tapes in the new library but could not write to them.  The data from the old library could not be "overpowered" by the new library!  I had to rent a special bulk tape eraser to be able to reuse my tapes.  I hope this helps you out!