>I have seen this on my system with 3590 E1A drives.
>TSM server 5.1.1.6 on AIX 4.3.3 ML10
>I did an audit of my tapes & found about 20 that were in this status.
>I checked them out & relabeled them.  I now have it down to 2 tapes that
>when TSM tries to use them it changes there status to private!
>I the actlog I see the following message:
>
>01/04/03 14:04:41     ANR8355E I/O error reading label for volume D00600
>                      in drive 3590DRV1 (/dev/rmt1).
>01/04/03 14:05:15     ANR8778W Scratch volume D00600 changed to Private
>                      Status to prevent re-access.
>Any ideas?

Hi, Bruce - This, unfortunately, is a continuing problem with 3590 tapes.
            Every month we order a few more boxes, and each such shipment
gives us some "difficult" 3590 tapes.  For example, out of a batch of 90,
3 or 4 might fail to label.  Retrying up to a half dozen more times will
finally get the tapes labeled.  Thereafter, some of the new tapes (not
necessarily the ones which were difficult to label) will get such I/O
errors perhaps 2/3 the way through the tape (which doesn't necessarily
mean much in serpentine terms), and *SM will properly react by setting
their Access to Readonly.  My experience is that persisting in changing
them back to Readwrite will allow the tape to be filled, in most cases,
and such tapes will behave better in the future.  Some of this is due
to their winding condition in manufacture, and partly in "breaking in"
the oxide surface.  (Slightly used tapes tend to be the most reliable
performers because their surface has been smoothed and detritus knocked
off while the medium remains new and not worn.)  A tiny minority of
these tapes are hopeless.  Happens on all drives - new, used, and upgraded.

We 3590 customers have been going through this for years now, and are
not happy about manufacturing standards.  "Tape is tape", but should be
better than this.

  Richard Sims, BU