Keath,

Last year, I did almost the same thing you are wanting to do.  In my
case, I had 2 STK 9940B drives in a library with 9940A drives.  AS with
the LTO drives, the 9940B is read compatible with the 9940A, but will
not append to a tape already written by the 9940A.  Here is what I did.

All drives 9940A and 9940B were configured as HCART.
I created a tape pool with tapes I was going to use to eval the 9940B
drives.
Whenever I was using the 9940B drives, I "downed" all the 9940A drives
and "upped" the 9940B drives.  After I was finished, I downed the 9940B
drives and upped the 9940A drives.

The only other way was to use the 9940B drives as HCART2, but that
creates problems when you need to read tapes written by the older
drives, as NetBackup won't mount an HCART tape in an HCART2 drive.

We're going to replace our 9940A drives with the 9940B drives this year,
and our plan is to suspend all tapes that have active images so that NBU
won't try to mount them for a backup on the new tape drives.   During my
evaluation, I found that if that did happen ("A" tape on a "B" drive),
NBU would get an error as soon as it tried to write to the tape.  It
would then unmount the tape and try another.  Suspending these tapes
would prevent this search for an empty tape, but still allow those
suspended tapes to be used for restores.  After all the images on the
suspended tapes have been expired, we will unsuspend them and relabel
them so they can be used in the new tape drives.

On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 09:25, Marx, Keath wrote:
> Okay,
> 
>   I have recently installed 2 Gen II LTO drives in my STK L40.  I had
> to do a period of review to verify they were viable and would be worth
> the expenditure.  Anyway, I have 2 Gen I drives in there as well.  I
> marked the new drives as hcart2.  I mark all the new media as hcart2. 
> 
> Now we all know the G2 drives can read and write the G1 media.  How
> can I tell this to Netbackup?  If there are no hcart2 tapes available
> it just won't use the new drives (which I realize is because the hcart
> vs hcart2 designation)  I have an order in for 2 more G2 drives but
> until then is there a way to tell netbackup that the hcart2 drives can
> use hcart media?  Thanks
> 
> 
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-- 
Jack L. Forester, Jr.
UNIX Systems Administrator, Stf
Lockheed Martin Information Technology
(304) 625-3946