Arcserve 6.61, NT4 Sp6a, DLT7000: Shows as blank media

[psyzar]

We currently use 3 flavours of Arcserve 6.61 on our NT4 fileservers around the world: Workgroup, Advanced and Enterprise. Our backup media is DLT-IV written on DLT7000 drives. When trying to recover the database and do a file restore using a tape written one machine (in the USA) on a machine in another location (UK), we are finding that Arcserve reports the media as blank and no data can be read from the tape. WE have tried the media in a number of our UK machines but with the same result. We have also sent a sample of the tapes back to the other location and the tapes can be read.

Any thoughts, pointers?

Thanks.

 

[ReddLefty]

Check out this thread and read the last post. It may be in conjunction with your problem..

thread478-586227

Also, hope that customs aren't using that big X-RAY machine to scan the box your sending your tapes in.




"In space, nobody can hear you click..."

 

[mohamdr]

Hi
1-Are all your location having the same media DLT-IV written on DLT7000 drives?
both tape drives has to been same format

2-Is this happen with certain tapes or it happen to all tapes.

3-What do you mean by:
When trying to recover the database and do a file restore using a tape written one machine (in the USA) on a machine in another location (UK).

Do you mean you are bringing the ARCserve Database from the location USA to location in UK and to do a restore?

4-Are tapes appear as blank tape as soon as you put in the drive?

5-Have you tried to merge the tape to database in UK and do a restore?

6-why you don't have same version in all your location?

7-what are the ARCserve version and service back in both USA & UK?

8-if the tapes are not recognized by the ARCserve in UK it will appear as a unrecognized media no Blank media .

Are you sure you are sending the correct tapes?

regards,
mohamdr

 

[psyzar]

Hi

Thanks for the responses. In answer to mohamdr's questions:

1 - we use DLT-IV media; Imation in USA, Quantum in UK
2 - only happening with DLT. Tapes written on Unix machines (tar and dump) don't have this problem.
3 - we backup machine X in USA to DLT using Arcserve, we then try to restore this tape to machine Y in UK using Arcserve. The Arcserve database is included on the tape for every backup which should allow us to merge/recover on any similar machine.
4 - device manager reportes the tapes "blank" as soon as they are put into drive
5 - we have tried to merge but we get "W3827: Unable to find the last sequence of this media" and "E3051: No database sessions found".
6 - don't ask
7 - both machines in question have ArcserveIT 6.61 Advanced Edition installed (not sure about Arcserve service packs); both machines are NT4 Sp6a.
8 - definitely reported as "blank"

If the custom's friendly x-rays are scanning our box, it hasn't caused them to become blank as the same tapes sent back to the USA can be read by the original machine used to write them.

All this points to a particular difference between our setups (most probably hardware) in USA and UK but what exactly I have not been able to fathom.

Are there known problems relating to reading media written by a drive by one manuafacturer and read on a drive by another manufacturer? We have not seen this in practice and we have a spread of Quantum, Tandberg and Compaq badged drives?

Thanks
Francois