Cant write the ArchiveIndex to tape in commvault 1

[comvopr]

I have a job that wrote to an lto4 tape just fine, but it cannot write it's ArchiveIndex to it to finish it up. Why?
The request to write fails, the job itself suspends, the tape is unmounted after 20 minutes, then the job request is auto resumed/retried, the tape with the same storage policy & room left on the tape is selected before allocating from the scratch pool.... the tape is remounted in the drive, and the write to it fails, cycle repeats.
This tape was initially discovered 10/6/09, and has been mounted 63 times. It has been "reused" 1 time, meaning everything that was written to it was aged off, it went back to scratch, and it's now on it's 2nd "use"
So why can it only now write a stream of backup data once, and it won't allow another stream to write to it ( the ArchiveIndex of the same backup job);
AND why does it keep trying until the tape gets enough device errors to mark it "bad" finally, before it will try to allocate another empty scratch tape?
The conflict is that commvault sees this tape as eligible to be written to again by this job. But once it mounts up, nope the write fails. This is in the SL8500.

 

[605]

You are right - this looks weird. But let me try to explain this more generally: If the data path itself is o.k., maybe the data is not. In other words: If the index data cannot be read for whatever reason, it can not be written to tape aas well.

You might want to check this running a new full, starting a new Index cycle. In this case, a new index will be started and backed up. If this runs successfully, this would in fact point to a corrupt index on the last backup cycle.

Now, i don't know how the media agent will be able to add info to a defect index but cannot back it up later. But this is another story. You should be able to get more details from the logs pointing out the real problem. This might help.