Rebuilding the libvol

[mosiac]

So I've had some issues with my tape library and got them sorted. One problem was that I had to rebuild the library now of course I had tapes in there at the time and q libvol shows nothing now.

I see from https://adsm.org/forum/index.php?th...ary-drives-q-libvol-showing-no-volumes.28339/

You are to run a couple of commands

CHECKIN LIBVOL <library> SEARCH=Y STATUS=SCR CHECKL=BARC
CHECKIN LIBVOL <library> SEARCH=Y STATUS=PRIV CHECKL=BARC


My question is, if I do this, what does it reference to decide what barcodes are scratch and what barcodes are private.

I'm being told from someone who's knowledge I don't trust, that if I run that command it will turn every tape in my library to scratch tapes because there's currently nothing listed by doing q libvol.

So is that the case?

 

[Harry_Redl]

Hi,
this is correct - when assigning a tape as scratch, TSM checks its volume history (in the DB), storagepools etc. If tape is found there (not being scratch) then it refuses to set this tape as scratch with message

ANR8443E <Command>: Volume <volume name> in library <library name> cannot be assigned a status of SCRATCH.

If you do it vice versa, then all your tapes end in "Private" status (it is OK having empty tape marked as Private) with no scratches to use.

Hope it helps
Harry

 

[mosiac]

It does. Not long after posting this question I found a thread that basically confirmed my thoughts on the matter. So I went ahead and ran the commands. This caused a new problem that again was created by the person I didn't trust previously.

We migrated to a new version of Tivoli using a new server, fresh install etc. He was supposed to migrate the db and everything about all the tapes in the library that belonged to that server. I don't think that task was accomplished correctly because after rebuilding our library last night due to me trying to fix something and not figuring out was the real problem was until it was too late, I had to rebuild the library and we ended up with over 50 scratch tapes, when as of yesterday we had around 7 previously.

I'm not too concerned with the data on those tapes because they would be worthless as far as I can figure and honestly I'm trying to fix everything backwards.

Thanks for the help though!