On Nov 26, 2012, at 5:59 PM, Simon Tyler wrote:
Today I had some tapes brought in from offsite storage and I loaded
them into the autoloader. One of the tapes was recognized, and the other
(slot 7) showed in the Autoloader website and in the bacula (backup software) as
Empty or not recognized.
I mounted the unrecognized tape, stopped bacula, and did this:
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
mt -f /dev/nst0 weof
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
This rewinds the tape and marks end of file at the beginning, "deleting" the tape.
Then I started bacula and checked the status again.
This
time, the tape in slot 8 was unrecognized, and the tape in slot 7 was
recognized. This exact scenario has happened enough times that I'm
confident I made no error; it's happening too often to be failed tapes.
In the past, simply loading or mounting a tape from one slot, is enough
to have a tape in another slot show as unrecognized.
So now that I've deleted the tape,
Point of clarification: you've [effectively] erased the tape. I say effectively, because the data is still on there, but way outside the scope of this discussion.
I'm being petty here only because the jargon used in this situation is important.
is there a way to reset the entry for that tape in Bacula, as the Catalog thinks it's holding data?
delete volume
This removes the entry from the Catalog.
Then you'll want to issue a label command.
