Folks, 

A question regarding cycling expired database backup tapes for use as
scratch/data tapes. For reasons too long to explain, we were advised to
clear these tapes down by running a standalone 'tar' command over the tapes,
the understanding being that next time these tapes were mounted, bplabel
would automatically kick in and allow the media to be overwritten. Wrong -
we get media write errors whenever we try to backup and duplicate to these
tapes.
 
So, we've a collection of these tapes to get back into the cycle and I've
tried the command: 

bplabel -ev MediaID -d hcart -p Test -o
 
and get back:
 
bplabel: error occurred writing label, No such file or directory 
(if -o is not in place we also get informed that 'Media is already NetBackup
format....')
 
The media has been successfully deassigned through volmgr and bpexpdate'd,
and I've tried both pre-mounting the tape in library or trying to let the
robot mount it without luck. 

Anyone have any ideas? Base config info below:
 
Master/media servers: All NT4 SP6a and use SSO 
Library: STK L700 with fibre 9840 drives 
NetBackup version: 3.4.0 J0850482 
bpvault: 3.4 

Thanks, 

Andrew Taylor
Halifax plc.


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