Error 96 when there are scratchpool tapes?

[jonnyguitar]

Hi all.  I hope you everyone had a lovely weekend.  They are just too short!

My Monday morning hasn't been the best so far.  My weekend backups stopped at around 80% with error 96 - no available media.  The thing is, I had at least 25 scratchpool tapes in the library ready to use at the time of the error.

Interestingly, the same error happened to jobs running on another tape library at the same time - again this other library had plently of scratchpool tapes at the time of the error.

Any ideas?  Thanks everyone!

[mansoor_sheik]

Hi,

Scartch pool will provide tapes to other volume pool when their is a tape shortage.

Is the status of tapes in scartchpool are active?

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Double-check that your scratchpool has the 'Scratch Pool' option selected.
You can use the GUI or from cmd with 'vmpool -list_scratch'.

We have seen in the past that this tick-box somehow got de-selected.

Also verify that the density of media in Scratch pool matches the density of tape drives.

[Andy_Welburn]

There are quite a few reasons why a '96' could occur & instead of trying to list then here & probably missing a few, you could try & go through the steps in the following "wizard":

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=answers&type=wizard&answerid=&iqaction=&wizardid=NBU090&wizardstepid=1A&question_box=%22Status+Code+96%22&wizardnextstep=&searchid=1353929122329

[jonnyguitar]

this is great advice, thanks everyone

[Marianne]

If your problem has been solved, please remember to select the post that has helped you most and Mark as Solution. This will help other users with similar issues.

[jonnyguitar]

Thanks Marianna.  Will do.  It's so great to see such a working support community on here.  It's great.

[sclind]

Jonny - also check the GUI to see if any of your media has a "Volume Expiration" listed.  We had a bunch that did, and did not realize that this meant that 'after this date don't use this media'.  (But the media still shows up in the Available Media report so we thought it was available for use).