Tape Erase or format request
 

I want to thank you for your reply. I solved the problem with the
tapes being rejected by adding the carts to a group and erasing them.
I now am facing an exsisting problem. The drives will not compress.
Each of the drives have hardware compression enabled but when I enable
compression in the backup software the status shows that hardware
compression is enabled but I receive an uncompressed amount of data
stored on the full tape cart(DLT or NS20).

Eric Lee Green wrote:

In article , Howard Huntley ruminated:
I have two tape drives(DLT 15/30 and Travan TR-5), When I insert a
tape cartridge into the drives the drives reject the tapes with an
error message to erase or reformat the tapes because the tapes are in
an unrecognizable format. Some of the tapes have been written in the
drive with the same software(Veritas Backup exec v8.5). Can any one
tell me how to remedy this error. Are there any veritas patches to fix
this error??

Are the drives rejecting the tapes, or is Veritas Backup Exec rejecting
the tapes?

If the drives are rejecting the tapes, there's nothing you can do -- sorry,
you have bad tapes, or you have bad drives. I've had DLT drives that would
only read one out of three tapes that they'd written. I have no idea what
the problem was, all I know is that it was nothing that any software that I
wrote on the client side was going to be able to fix... if I can't get good
data out of the SCSI system (as a tape backup software author), there ain't
a helluva lot I can do software-wise.

Howard Huntley Jr. MCP, MCSE
MicroComputer Systems Specialist

In article , Howard Huntley ruminated:
I want to thank you for your reply. I solved the problem with the
tapes being rejected by adding the carts to a group and erasing them.
I now am facing an exsisting problem. The drives will not compress.
Each of the drives have hardware compression enabled but when I enable
compression in the backup software the status shows that hardware
compression is enabled but I receive an uncompressed amount of data
stored on the full tape cart(DLT or NS20).

Try 'tapeinfo' from the mtx package ( http://mtx.badtux.net ) and see
what it tells you about compression status on each of your drives after
your backup has run and before it has put away the tapes.

Also make sure you do not have *software* compression turned on in your
backup software. That renders hardware compression null and void, since
it will not compress already-compressed data. Also, if you're backing up
already-compressed or "random" data (such as video or music files), they
will not compress with hardware compression either either.

--
Eric Lee Green
Linux/Unix Software Engineer seeks employment
see http://badtux.org for resume


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