Veritas keeps telling me my tapes are BAD MEDIA

[jcraig49]

I'm running a Dell Powervault 110T single tape SCSI drive with BE 8.5. Everything has been running smooth for months now and then all of the sudden the drive started telling me my tapes were BAD MEDIA and stopped recongnizing them. I tried 5 different tapes that were all written to by this drive and none of them work. I also tried cleaning the drive but I'm not having any luck. I've also noticed the alert light is on on the drive. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Craig

 

[steveot]

The alert means the drive is faulting. There are two head in the drive a read/write head. Sound like the write head is good since you say you can write to the tapes. When you read the tapes, inventory, etc it report bad media. The read head cant read the tape correctly and flags it as bad media or cleaning media..basically becuase it cant read the header. If you have tried 5 tape and that alert on the hardware itself then look at getting the drive fixed or replaced. Check you system log too. You will probably see some errors. If you seeing tape alerts in the backup job - again that points to the hardware

 

[jcraig49]

I just replaced the drive with a brand new one and I'm still getting failed inventories. I used the same stand alone enclosure and SCSI cable though. Could that be an issue?

 

[steveot]

Could be - did you check the system log for errors