Can Long Erase be installed?

[DavePL]

We're running Backup Exec (actually Seagate ver.7.0 rev.719) on a Windows NT 4.0 server. Our tape drive is an Archive Python 04106, that uses 4MM DAT cartridges, 12 GB, DDS-3 format.
We can do a quick erase, however our device doesn't support long erases, it is greyed out. We would like to do long erases, in order to recycle and reuse some tapes that are unusable and seen as bad media.
We are wondering if there are some device drivers or upgrades available that will do this, or would we have to get a different tape drive?

 

[dvannoy]

You can slove this problem by doing an overwrite when you backup...Maybe take a look at the original install and see if that option was checked .... I was running V7.x and never really had that problem. but i can tell you one thing...if you do get full erase installed you will probally never use it...it would take several hours to erase a tape...I talked to seagate and they said that was normal...They just suggested to just overwrite the tape.

hope this helps DVannoy
MIS
A+,Network+,CNA

 

[VeritasUser]

I don't know about DAT tapes. But my long erase's on Mammoth2 tapes aren't that long. There 60 Gig native, 150 Gig compressed and take about 1 hour and 25 minutes per tape. But for tapes that expierenced a severe job fail and created bad blocks on the tape. This is the only solution. A quick erase, at least on these tapes, only remove the header information. And over writing a tape doesn't work because it trys to use the same block and cyclinder the was defined when it was first written to.

Mark