When you get a brand new tape and you put a barcode on it then you put it in the library.
Netbackup is told about the BARCODE and shows that to you.
The first time the tape is written to it is give a Written label on the start of the tape.
This is the media label as compared to the External label ( the barcode).
Now the next time you go to use the tape - when it is mounted the media label is compared to the external label to see if they match. If they DO then the tape is written to.
If they do NOT match then the tape is Frozen.
Reason being is that NB does not know if this was on purpose or by mistake. Say the barcodes fell off of two tapes and you put then on wrong. One tape had all images expired and the other one had valid images on it. When the barcodes were put on wrong the good tape could have been over written.
So this failsafe was put in place to verify that the barcodes match.
So if you want to change a barcode, First make sure all images on the tape have expired.
Change the barcode.
Delete the previous media from the NB console
put the tape in the library and inventory
Now as stated by the other people above, right click the new media and choose Label ( runs the bplabel command)
UN-CHECK the 'verify media label' ( this would make it compare the two and see that they are different and would not allow it). With that unchecked it will force it to write the new media id to the tape. Be careful of this as it will force the over write of valid media as well.