Tape corruption

[morrison1977]

We had an issue in our backup environment where the server would bluescreen during backups.(Server 2003Entx32, Netbackup 6.5.4, HP LTO3 tape drives),  Long storty short Microsoft analyzed kernal dumps to find that vmtape.sys is initiating a invalid request to the scsi cards and resulting in a bluescreen; we temporarily turned off MSEO encryption and then upgraded to the latest version of vmtape.sys from Symantec Netbackup 7 and problem resolved (still running 6.5.4), however as this was going on for weeks, we are now left with a bad legacy of random tapes that are corrupted because they were writing during the bluescreen.  Every time one of the corrupt media is re-used it downs a tape drive.  The easy answer would be to look at the event log for the bad tape every time a -86 error shows up in Netbackup and destroy the tape, but that's a lot of tapes to trash and what I would like to know is if there is an easy way to run some kind of tape checkdisk on the tapes, I've tried the HP Storageworks media test tools and they comes back with the tape is fine, no problems found.  And in the meantime I need some way to automatically have a script that re-ups the drives when they go down due to corrupt tapes or set a higher fail rate, I think the default is 4, so even though Netbackup encounters serveral I/O errors it doesn't down the drive.

Thanks.

[J_H_Is_gone]

Have you trided doing a long erase on the tape that should clean up any errors on it.

you may also want to do a bplabel on it to make sure the beginging of the tape is good.

The only way to get the tape checked is to have it certified by a company that does that.

[Marianne]

I agree - don't destroy a tape because of a positioning error. The bluescreen simply means that there was no EOF mark written.

Unless there is physical damage on the tapes, you should be able to expire the tapes, label them, then use again.

[Stumpr2]

Were/are you perhaps using encryption? You my need to relabel the tape.

[Nicolai]

Suspend the tapes generating status code 86. Once the backups are expired, the tape will be good.

bpmedia -m {mediaid} -suspend -h {media_server_who_wrote_the_server}