Try running the first try again only use -d hcart2. According to your vmquery 
output it is a ?" tape not dlt. If that doesn't' work try HCART2.

 

Patrick Whelan 
NetBackup Specialist 
Architect & Engineering 
+44 20 7863 5243 

... Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte 
- Martin Niem?ller 

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces at mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces 
at mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Szekely-Bencedi, Endre (Genworth, 
Contractor)
Sent: 13 April 2007 12:02
To: veritas-bu at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Problem recycling old CATALOG tapes

 

Hi Everyone,

 

I've been having some problems with my backups since a week. I found this list 
googleing around, hope you can spare a few minutes to read this and maybe help 
me.

 

I don't know much of backups really, I needed to start and handle media a few 
weeks ago. We usually have 12-15 tapes filled each day with backups, half of it 
goes ofsite with a month retention (including catalog tapes), half we keep 
here.... talking of daily backups of course.

The guy before me showed me that sometimes tapes don't get deassigned after 
expiration; he told me roughly how to check for this and how to deassign/expire 
a tape manually.

He also told me I should place old catalog tapes back to scratch pool.

 

Now. As I started to understand more about netbackup, I realised we have lots 
of frozen tapes. Tapes that always get assigned but don't get written. I have 
turned on bptm log and noticed these are all old catalog tapes (googled the 
error message). The problem is, since we always put old catalog tapes back to 
scratch pool, the next day's catalog tape will be a random tape. So, we just 
end up with more and more catalog tapes that we cannot write on. I guess this 
was just a mistake noone noticed before...

 

Anyway. I have unfrozen the tape and the next day it got frozen again. Then I 
have found some docs saying that if you want to recycle a catalog tape you need 
to relabel it. But, relabeling doesn't work for me... tried 2 methods so far:

 

Z:\>bplabel -ev 000188 -d dlt
Requested number of drives are not configured

 

in the Activity Monitor I have:

 

12/04/2007 14:38:40 - begin Label
12/04/2007 14:38:40 - started process bplabel (976)
12/04/2007 14:38:40 - mounting 000188
12/04/2007 14:38:41 - Error bplabel(pid=976) Requested number of drives are not 
configured
12/04/2007 14:38:41 - end Label; elapsed time: 00:00:01
error requesting media (tpreq)(98)

 

Then I tried to relabel using the GUI:

12/04/2007 14:41:49 - begin Label
12/04/2007 14:41:49 - started process bplabel (77988)
12/04/2007 14:41:49 - mounting 000188
12/04/2007 14:42:39 - mounted; mount time: 00:00:50
12/04/2007 14:42:42 - expected media 000188; found NetBackup media
12/04/2007 14:42:42 - end Label; elapsed time: 00:00:53
media manager found wrong tape in drive(93)

 

Okay, I know sometimes you can get error if the media type is different - I am 
not even sure how to check what it is...

For example I got this tape:

C:\>vmquery -m 000200
================================================================================

media ID:              000200
media type:            1/2" cartridge tape 2 (14)
barcode:               000200L2
media description:     Added by Media Manager
volume pool:           SCRATCH (3)
robot type:            TLD - Tape Library DLT (8)
robot number:          0
robot slot:            9
robot control host:    fileserver1.domain
volume group:          00_000_TLD
vault name:            ---
vault sent date:       ---
vault return date:     ---
vault slot:            ---
vault session id:      ---
vault container id:    -
created:               19/07/2005 17:35:25
assigned:              ---
last mounted:          13/04/2007 10:34:03
first mount:           20/07/2005 10:21:40
expiration date:       ---
number of mounts:      65
max mounts allowed:    ---
================================================================================

 

This tape is one of the many I am keeping an eye on since the past days and 
can't get to write them. I also tried to delete it using 'vmdelete', hoped 
netbackup will forget about it but it didn't - at the next backup try the tape 
got frozen again because "it contains VERITAS NetBackup (tm) database backup 
data and cannot be used for backups."

 

If you got any ideas, please don't hesitate to help me.

 

Thanks,

Endre

 



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