Angelos,
I guess you haven't read much about TSM and in the past you worked with
other backup solutions. Your question is not uncommon, why should one
think TSM has a different internal behaviour and tape management than
other products...

I can't give you a complete introdution in a few lines, I'll just try to
point out some facts about tape management to help you understand what
made your TSM server "unhealthy":
TSM works with a TSM database and storage pools. The database holds a
"mirror copy" of the directory structure on your clients. It also has
information on older versions of files that are already deleted or
overwritten by new data. The database entries point into your storage
pools on disk (diskpool in the TSM server) or tape.
Now when TSM needs additional tape space, a new (scratch) tape is
allocated. The tape status is changed from scratch to private an it gets
defined into a (tape-)storage pool. When all data on the tape has
expired or has been moved to a new tape (space reclamation), TSM returns
the tape into your scratch pool.
There are no sessions on a tape that expire after a predefined number of
days. With the backup method "incremental forever" TSM doesn't
retransmit any data that has already been backed up. When there aren't
too many changes on the client, a tape can survive years without having
to be reclaimed.

To come back to your problem: The tapes you wanted to check in as
scratch tapes are full of data, data your TSM server still needs (when
you have to restore a nodes data).

The first thing you have to do is: get new tapes to keep TSM running.
The second thing: think about getting a larger library with enough space
for ALL tapes TSM needs. Otherwise you could become a tape-disc-jockey
very soon (8->).

Good luck!

Best regards,
Michael

Angelos Loizou wrote:
>
> Anybody can help me with this :
> I 'm using an IBM Ultrium tape library with 7 tapes.
> A few weeks ago my first set of tapes were full so I got another set of 7
> and checked them in TSM. All worked fine.
> Now the second set is full and I need to reuse the first set for backups.
> TSM will not allow me to checkin the volumes as scratch resulting in failing
> backups with an error :
>
> ANR1405W Scratch volume mount request denied - no scratch volume available.
>
> What do I have to do in order to reuse my old set of tapes?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Angelos
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
> http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx

--
Michael Bartl                               mailto:michael.bartl AT cw DOT com
Michael Bartl                               mailto:michael.bartl AT cw DOT com
Office of Technology, IT Germany/Austria    Tel: +49-89-92699-806
Cable & Wireless Deutschland GmbH.          Fax: +49-89-92699-302
Landsberger Str. 155, D-80687 Muenchen      http://www.cw.com/de