Bill - Your tracking of tape problems is just the right thing to do, to
       determine if a tape is really troublesome.

A new tape, being fully used for the first time, may exhibit problems
as usage effectively unwinds it for the first time, and abrades its
surface. Irregularities in winding go away after some spooling; and
surface irregularities may get "polished away" after a few passes.
(In the recording industry, it has been recognized that tapes are at
their best after having been used a few times.)

Tapes which exhibit problems over multiple drives warrant some study
before summarily disposing of them. IBM provides an excellent
facility for this: the tapeutil/ntutil command, where the rwtest
function is one way of exercising and evaluating a tape. (A tape
being overwritten like this should be checked out of TSM, and be
processed by 'Label Libvolume' if returned to TSM service.)

Don't hesitate to return defective newish tapes to their manufacturer
for refund or replacement, as there can be bad batches, and that
should be their penalty, not the customer's.

   Richard Sims

On May 27, 2005, at 9:26 AM, Bill Rozmiarek wrote:

How do you go about determining that a tape is bad and needs to be
thrown
replaced? The way I do it is to keep track of any tapes that have
been set
to read-only due to an error (q act msg=1411). When I see one, I
mark it
read-write and keep track of it. When the same tape gets set to
read-only
due to an error a second time, I do a 'move data' if there's
anything on it
and then eject it, delete the volume, and replace it with a new
tape. I
don't know that that tape is really bad so I could be throwing
tapes (and
money) in the garbage unnecessarily.
Is there a way to certify a tape like I can a disk?
How do you determine that a tape needs to be replaced?