Phase One import cannot read media header.

[bigmikeo]

I have several AIT-3 tapes from one of our customers that we can not import into our Netbackup server. The backup tapes were used on a Netbackup Version 4.5FP_3GA server. The tape drives used were SONY SDX-700C drives running with firmware level 0202.

Our Netbackup server is running version 5.1 on a Sun Solaris server. The output from "uname -a" shows we are using the following; SunOS 5.8 Generic_117350-26 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-480R. We are using SONY SDX-700C drives at firmware level 0208.

Our attempts to run Phace One Import are failing with the following errors;

Block read is not a Netbackup or Backup Exec media header, Len = 512, media id ######, drive index #, data is ANSI-format

Status = cannot read media header, may not be Netbackup media or is corrupted

The Phase One ends with an error code (172).

We have tried several things to correct this difficulty. We tried changing our server to use Fixed Block Sizes instead of variable block. We tried changing the size of the data buffer. Nothing has worked so far.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what we need to do to correct this problem?

 

[comtec17]

Definetly sounds like a block size issue. Check the st.conf on both servers and the storage unit configurations and compare them

 

[bigmikeo]

We have an answer for our difficulty. The backup tapes we are attempting to import have badly formatted media headers.

Netbackup expects to find a one record media header in the first file of backup tapes. The tapes we are attempting to import have two records in the first file on the tape. This makes it impossible for Netbackup to read the correct media header record.

Our customer is running test restorations to see if thier Netbackup server has any difficulties reading the media header records on it's own backup tapes.

If we are to continue our attempts to restore data from those tapes on our Netbackup server we will have to find a method that can bypass the faulty media header records.

 

[Vela]

Depending on the drive manufacturer. You might be able to contact them and possibly get a "lab" version of tape firmware that would allow you to use 'mt' commands to get past those bad header files.

We had to talk to StorageTek to get a firmware that would allow us to read past the the header files on expired tapes.