Erasing Tapes

[malkaul]

I have been erasing old DLT 40/80 tapes in my new
DLT 40/80 drives using the "quick erase plus"
method.

The tape drives are on NW 5.1 SP2 servers running
Arcserve 6.6/IT.

The problem is that sometimes after erasing the
tapes, when I look in the tape status window the
tape appears as write protected. If I go back
and run the erase plus again it comes up ok.

However, If I put one these erased tapes that now
appear as Blank, into a server that is requesting
a blank tape for an autopilot job the tape does
not work, it just comes up as write protected and
therefore the job does not continue until I put
in a brand new blank tape.

Has anyone else had this problem? or does anyone
have any suggestions on why this might be
happening and how to resolve the issue?

 

[phliphines]

Unfortunately I do not have the exact detail to hand, but I can tell you why this happens.

It is all a question of the Blocksize that the tape was originally formatted in on your server.

By default on most Netware systems this is set to 16Kb, however DLT tapes are capable of up to 64Kb. Although Novell do not recommend this, the problem is that Netware and ARCserve are configured once unless of course you change the systems to improve your throughput. Thus the system will expect to see the same Blocksize on every tape it uses, if it does not then it mistakenly reports a write protected tape.

Further information can be found on CA's website,

http://www.cai.com

search in the tech support area for Blocksize and performance, the articles of most interest should be found.

I hope this helps.....

 

[malkaul]

Thank you for the suggestion, but I also thought it might have been blocksize. However I know that on at least one of the servers that I am having a problem with there have not been any configuration changes at all in the last six months. Also where possible I always erase the tapes in the server that last formatted them so it shouldn't really be an issue.