first, thank you to everyone who has ever responded to one of my
questions. those responses have helped greatly. 
an issue i am experiencing now is a mismatch between what tapes nbu
thinks are in our robot and what tapes media manager thinks are there.
for example, when i run a vmquery on our robot, it generates a list of
tapes. i then run some of those tape numbers through bpmedialist to see
what the status is, and i get a message saying the media id could not be
found in the nbu or mm db. since i got the tape number initially from
the mm db, i am confused. i  believe i have many tapes in this
situation. is there any hope other than manually inventorying all the
tapes?

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jeff maley            | 415.832.5414
enterprise operations | 415.218.3106
::macromedia::        | jmaley AT macromedia DOT com