hi all,
     Is anyone having any experience on dealing with hardware
related hangs for bpvault? For bpvault, once a media error or tape
drive error occur, the duplication just hung there and I have to kill
the bptm. We are using the DLT7000

1)   How do I determine whether it is the tape that is the problem
     or the drive is the problem, other than just retire the tape
     to see if it solves the problem?
2)   Is there anything we can do to make sure the image backed up
     really work? The backup goes smoothly enough, and since
     sometimes it is the reading part of the duplication which cause
     the problem, I assume the same problem will happen during the
     restore. Isn't it true that the tape drive will automatically skip bad
     blocks? Why it doesn't seem to work in my case?
3)   Before I load a batch of new tapes to the library, is there any easy
     way to make sure those tapes does not have problems? A
     whole tape write and read will be very time consuming if I load
     30 tapes into the library at one time.
4)   Other than bpvault.all.output_V1 /var/adm/messages and bptm
     logs, are there any other logs that contain patterns which can be
     viewed by Tivoli that we can know the tape drive is retrying over
     and over?
5)   Is it possible to do better load balancing? When one of those tape
     pairs hanged, all those jobs behind the current are stuck.
6)   Any other helper scripts for bpvault you can share?

Please help as media errors are bitting hard recently,
Thanks,
Michael