I would probably open a ticket with Symantec first, but a long time ago I had 
some FUBAR media from days past that were assigned but had no images in the 
catalog.  I was able to get them back into the scratch pool by running vmquery 
-deassignbyid.  Use this with caution however.  It sounds to me like you have a 
legitimate issue, and I would want to get support involved.  But if you don't 
have the time, contract or desire to go to support with this, then I think 
vmquery will do the trick.  I never figured out why my media wouldn't recycle 
properly, but using this command definitely worked.

-Jonathan
 

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu 
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Jorge 
Fábregas
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 8:02 PM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Expired media not returning to SCRATCH & Vault

On Tuesday 15 September 2009 04:22:33 pm Tim Hoke wrote:
> When a tape is suspended, it won't be used for any write operations 
> until it expires.  When all the images expire, cleanup operations will 
> run and it should become un-suspended and made available for use.  
> This differs from frozen in that frozen media require manual 
> intervention (even after all images expire).

Thanks for clarifying this!

> So, the first course of action is to determine why the media isn't 
> becoming expired. 1. When your cleanup jobs run, what is the exit 
> status code? Zero or something else? - You can initiate a cleanup job 
> by running 'bpimage -cleanup'

When the cleanup process runs , the exit code is 0 and when I run it manually 
with bpimage I receive no error...

>  2. If you run bpexpdate -deassignempty, what happens?

Wow.  I get a list of exactly ALL the tapes (around 50) having this exact 
issue!  But bad news... After it asks me if I'm sure if I want to continue I 
get, for every tape, a line like this:

Could not deassign media-id 000498, host myhost: database system error (220)

So...once again the "database system error". 

> 3. What happens when you un-suspend the media? (bpmedia -unsuspend -m 
> <string> -v [-h <hostname>])

I can perfectly suspend/unsuspend (Exit status = 0).  The problem seems to be 
with unassigning...

> 4 . In either case above, what does all log entries report tell you? 

Ok, I'll need to create the relevant dirs and restart the services.  I'l check 
that and I'l keep looking for this "dabase system error" that seems to be the 
main culprit of all this behaviour.  Thanks Tim for pointing me to the right 
direction.

Best regards,
Jorge

> P.S. Do you have a support contract?  Now would be a good time to call...
> hint, hint, nudge, nudge

We were in the renewal process a couple of weeks ago. I need to check that :) 
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