Luc gave you the the "bpmedia -unfreeze -m tapeid" command, but I rarely 
use it.

You're right to want to know *why* they are frozen!   They could be 
frozen because you or one of your scripts froze them.

More likely, NetBackup froze them because or problems.  Most of these 
tapes have an entry made in the "errors" file.  On my Solaris system, I 
can use the following command to view the errors file:

   less +G /usr/openv/netbackup/db/media/errors

However, it's been my experience that NetBackup will freeze some tapes 
without making an entry in the errors file. :-(

To know why these latter tapes are frozen, you must have your NetBackup 
log entries for the action still available, or have recorded it 
externally to NetBackup.  This is an area of NetBackup that could really 
use improvement!

I started out by saying that I rarely unfreeze a tape.  That's only 
partially true.  A frozen tape is left assigned.  When I see some in the 
"expired" section of the Media Summary report, I expire the tapes 
(bpexpdate -m tapeid -d 0) and change them to a volume pool I have named 
Baudelaire. (The name will make sense only to Lemony Snickett fans).  If 
a tape has had only one or two events, or if the events have been due to 
a bad tape drive or other circumstance not indicating a media problem, 
I'll erase the tape when I have time and put it back into service 
(Scratch or other appropriate pool). 

In all cases, all of the tape errors and actions are briefly recorded in 
a blog.

Hope this helps, wayne

Larsen, Errin M HMMA/IT wrote, in part,  on 6/20/2005 3:52 PM:

>Hi everyone,
>
>  I've got a few tapes that are reported FROZEN.  What's the right way
>to check why they are frozen and then how do I un-freeze them?
>  
>