Error 96? Is tape full?

[mhdganji]

Hi,

My tape was working flawlessly for a week and then in the middle of a job I got an error 96 and the job or any other was not working. The capacity shows 22 TB and maybe my LTO 8 is full although I was able to get more than 28 with the same machines... any way

I've two questions:

1- Assuming the tape is full or I'd like to take it out, is there any special procedure? With BE, I used catalog and then export to portal and get the tape out of my MSL 2024 mail slot. Any special thing to do here or just go to the tape library interface, move it to mail slot and take it?

2- Is the tape really full? This is my tape summary report. My media is A00001 and placed in netbackup pool.

Regards,

[quebek]

Hello

Well non-active media can be either full, suspended or frozen.

Please use this command to see its status:

bpmedialist -m A00001

This should give you some clues.

About ejecting tapes from TL. Well you can just take it out and run inventory afterwards, ie

vmupdate -rt tld -rn 0 -empty_map -use_barcode_rules -use_seed

or your can from GUI find it in robot, right click and press eject - but then you have to go to library within some time frame and take it out, once taken out you will have to confirm it was ejected....

good luck

[mhdganji]

And the problem is still there after putting a new tape in netbackup pool and even restarting devices management service. Any other operations needed?

In fact, running available_media.cmd and other reports still show the MPX/FULL/XTB which is about the old one.

I tried the tape in slot 1 and also the drive slot, restarted services but still no luck

[mph999]

Yes, your tape really is full.

LTO8 holds about 12TB of data uncompressed, if the data is perfectly compressible then it holds about 30TB.

So 22TB sounds about right - not all data is compressible, and not all data that is compressible, compresses the same amount.

Ultimately however, NetBackup has no understanding of tape capacity, if left alone, it would try and write to the same tape 'forever'.  It is the tape drive firmware that decides when a tape is full, as it reads the 'this tape is almost full' marker that is written on the tape during manufacturing.  It then tells the tape driver not to send any more data and it is the tape driver that tells NetBackup to mark the tape as full.

A tape should always be able to store the native amount of data (incompressible), 12TB in the case of LTO8, so if for example the tape was being marked full at only 8TB, we can be certain this would be incorrect, although as explained, the issue would be caused by either the tape drive firmware or the tape driver, 

If you truly believe the data is 'compressible' enough that more than 22TB should fit on the tape you would have to discuss it with the hardware vendor, but it would be very difficult to prove, as you would have to show that the tape drive is not compressing the data fully, so you just have to make a judgement call sometimes.  I guess you could try duplicating the tape to another using a different drive and see if the tape shows the same amount of data.

Ultimately, if you did have an issue and that is caused by the tape firmware, you would also have to test using drives at a different firmware version.

Regarding the status 96, make sure the tape is showing as the same density as the drive (eg, hcart2, hcart3 etc) - that is probably the most common cause of status 96.