In the normal course of events, you should not need to change the status
of a tape from private to scratch.  When all the data on a given volume
expires the tape will go into a pending state for the reuse delay time
defined for the storage pool. When the reuse delay is up, it will be
deleted from the storagepool and go to a scratch status.  This assumes
it started out as a scratch tape and was not manually assigned to a
storagepool with a 'def vol' command.

The following script will list any lost tapes you might have, i.e.
tapes that are not in a storagepool or being used as a db backup but are
not in scratch status:

tsm: ULTSM>q script q_lost_tapes f=l

Name       Line   Command
           Number
---------- ------
------------------------------------------------------------
Q_LOST_TA- 10     select volume_name as "Private Tapes NOT in Use" -
 PES
           20     from libvolumes -
           30     where status='Private' -
           40     and libvolumes.volume_name not in -
           50     (select volume_name from volumes) -
           60     and libvolumes.volume_name not in -
           80     (select volume_name from volhistory -
           90     where type in ('BACKUPFULL', -
           100    'BACKUPINCR', -
           110    'DBSNAPSHOT', -
           120    'EXPORT'))


>>> Ashok.Vats AT FTB.CA DOT GOV 4/20/2006 4:39 PM >>>
We are experiencing a long wait when do q content volume_name. IS that
normal ...at times it will take over 2 hours ? what we want to do is
check if the volume has data in it if it has no data and marked Private
status then we want to change its status=Scratch but not if it has data
in it and it belongs to a Pool. I noticed q vol VOlume_name returns very
quick. IS it safe to assume that if volume doesn't belong to any pool
then it shouldn't have any data in it and we could update its
status=Scratch ?

Appreciate any input . We are on TSM server 5.3.0.0 with 3485library

Thanks
Ashok