This has always worked for me. If someone has a simpilar way to do it, I
would love to know about it.

Step 1. expire media
# bpexpdate -ev media_id -d 0

Step 2. deassign media from volume pool
# vmquery -deassignbyid media_id pool_number stat
    [stat  0 = media assigned to regular backup, 1 = media assigned to
database backup, 2 = media assigned to storage migrator]
  
Step 3 .delete media
# vmdelete -m media_id

Step 4. reimport media and assign to scratch pool.

Hope that helps.

AndrewTaylor2 AT halifax.co DOT uk writes:
>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 



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