Robster Posted August 29, 2007 Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 Hi I have a LaCie AIT 35Gb tape drive that is working fine with 35Gb tapes and will happily read 25Gb tapes HOWEVER I cannot get Retrospect to ERASE 25Gb tapes and I have a bunch of them I want to reuse or at least erase if I have to sell them. Anyone any idea why? I am running Retrospect 6.1.126 under Mac OSX 10.4.10 on a MacBook Pro. Cheers. Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 29, 2007 Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 Have you tried using a tape utility for the drive? I believe that Retrospect's "Erase" only puts down a new header, and wouldn't get rid of data further down the tape. Perhaps running a diagnostic on the tape that writes lots of blocks. Don't know if LaCie provides such diagnostics, Exabyte does. Another alternative is to purchase Tolis Group's (one of Retrospect's competitors) tape tools utility; Mac OS X does not provide tape drivers. Tape Tools Once Tape Tools is installed, it's simple to do a "dd" of big blocks of data from /dev/zero or /dev/random to blow away stuff. Or you could get a bulk eraser, but I haven't seen them around in years. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted August 29, 2007 Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 Here's a used Hewlett Packard degauser on eBay for a hundred bucks. Just make sure you take your wrist watch off before you use it! Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robster Posted August 29, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 I had a look at Tolis's site. It looks a LOT more complicated than Retrospect. Unfortunately I cannot find a demo of their Tape Tools, every except Tape Tools actually. Tape tools LOOKS like it has the right commands but then again so does Retrospect, the Erase button is there, it works on 35Gb tapes, I just don't understand why it is not enabled when a 25Gb tape is loaded? I really don't want to spend money on Tape Tools to find it has the same problem as Retrospect. ( But many thanks for the pointer by the way. Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 29, 2007 Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 Tolis Tape Tools includes unix drivers so you could use standard unix commands (e.g., dd) to do stuff like: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mt0 bs=16k and let it rip until end of tape. It's not Retrospect, and shouldn't / can't be compared with Retrospect. It's for unix command line. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robster Posted August 29, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 I really appreciate all the ideas but in reality I would like to re-use these tapes. The 35Gb drive can read the tapes, why can it not erase them? Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 29, 2007 Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 Quote: The 35Gb drive can read the tapes, why can it not erase them? What version of Retrospect wrote the tapes? And pardon me for asking, but I assume that they aren't write-locked. Correct? What does the tape icon in Configure > Devices look like when you put those tapes in? (color? description?) Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robster Posted August 30, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 30, 2007 Hi I am pretty sure it was version 6 that wrote them, there has been no significant upgrade for a LONG time. Yes the write protect lock is not on. ) Yellow tape icon, correct name of tape displayed and device says Ready. I notice when a 35Gb tape is loaded the icon is blue. I am assuming there is some significance in this? Cheers. Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 30, 2007 Report Share Posted August 30, 2007 Quote: I am pretty sure it was version 6 that wrote them Well, I really was looking for 6.1.x vs. 6.0.x. That's significant in this particular case. See below. Quote: there has been no significant upgrade for a LONG time. Yes, sad but true. Quote: Yellow tape icon, correct name of tape displayed and device says Ready. I notice when a 35Gb tape is loaded the icon is blue. I am assuming there is some significance in this? Yes, that's what I was suspecting, although I do not know the cause. See the release notes for Retrospect 6.1, which added, among other features, WORM tape marking for, I believe, SOX compliance, such that backup tapes, once written, cannot be overwritten or erased. See: Retrospect 6.1 release notes Now, how Retrospect came to believe that your 25 GB tapes should be marked as WORM tapes, I don't have a clue. I don't have a clue how to recover from this, either. If it were possible to override the WORM status, that would seem to defeat the whole purpose. Good luck. You might reconsider the bulk eraser approach. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robster Posted August 31, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 Ahhhhhhhhhhh Now at least I know the problem BUT these tapes were NEVER WORM tapes, I was happily reusing them with my old tape drive until I upgraded tot e newer 35Gb drive. So basically Retrospect has somehow decided to destroy about 25 tapes for me!!!!!! Ggggrrrrrrrrr............ Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robster Posted August 31, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 Is there a URL for reporting a bug?????????? I am not happy throwing away all my tapes because of a bug/issue with Retrospect. Cheers. Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 31, 2007 Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 Quote: Is there a URL for reporting a bug?????????? Send an email to Robin Mayoff, head of Retrospect support. Or call support. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted August 31, 2007 Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 In this thread I see no information that clearly indicates what happens when you try to erase the tape. What happens when you click on the tape and select erase? Does the tape show as locked? Do you get an error during erase? Does the tape eject? Retrospect typically has very little control over this process. Sometimes the hardware can read older style tapes, but can not write to them. It could be this hardware only supports writing to 35 GB tapes and not 25's Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 31, 2007 Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 Quote: I was happily reusing them with my old tape drive until I upgraded That's the first you have mentioned that they worked in a previous tape drive. What happens if you connect that previous tape drive and try to erase them with it? It may be that the previous tape drive put down a header that the new tape drive flags as a WORM header to Retrospect. As for Robin's questions, I believe that a careful reading of the thread shows that you have answered them: Quote: then again so does Retrospect, the Erase button is there, it works on 35Gb tapes, I just don't understand why it is not enabled when a 25Gb tape is loaded? Quote: the write protect lock is not on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robster Posted August 31, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 I wish I had the old drive but unfortunately it went broke which is why I replaced it with a new higher capacity one. In fact I have TWO of the 35Gb drives and neither of them will erase these tapes. I am wondering though if an early version of Retrospect might!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't suppose anyone has the installer for 6.0 kicking around? Cheers. Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted August 31, 2007 Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 Before you do that, I would call Lacie and find out if this is a hardware related issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 31, 2007 Report Share Posted August 31, 2007 Quote: I am wondering though if an early version of Retrospect might!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't suppose anyone has the installer for 6.0 kicking around? 6.1 and older versions are online on the EMC site. Here's the link for the older versions: Archive of old Retrospect versions Because 6.1 was a free update for all 6.0 users, our 6.0 license code worked with 6.1. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robster Posted September 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 10, 2007 Well I tried LaCie and they confirmed it SHOULD work. They pointed me to a Sony site (it is a Sony mechanism) and a Terminal run package for erasing tapes and updating firmware on a Mac. IT managed to erase one of the tapes fine even though Retrospect cannot. I am now running some write tests from Retrospect but looks good at the moment. I really believe this is a Retrospect 6.1 issue with tapes created under the earlier version of Retrospect. But at least I have a solution and I can reuse my old tapes. Cheers. Robin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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