mallman Posted November 13, 2003 Report Share Posted November 13, 2003 Hello, We have recently split off from our old company, and have inherited a large number of DLT tapes (our old backups). These were written by a novell server which we no longer have, and have replaced by a pc with retrospect 6.0 running on windows 2k, and a quantum dlt1 drive. The system works beautifully with new, blank tapes, but since we can't read the old tapes, it would be very worthwhile to re-use the old tapes. But, when we put one of these in, it gets spat out again after some tape positioning saying "media error". It does this without me being able to hit the erase button in the device status page. I know that the tape I am trying to overwrite has only been written once, so it's not a case of a real "media error"... Any ideas how I can erase these now useless tapes and re-use them with your system? Cheers, MarkAW. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted November 14, 2003 Report Share Posted November 14, 2003 Hi Depending on the format of the tapes you may have to bulk erase them to get rid of all of the old data. Try it with a new tape and make sure the drive is working first. If that works look into bulk erasing the tapes Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mallman Posted November 14, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 14, 2003 Hello Nate, Tape drive working A ok. Thanks for the advice - sorry for being a newbie! Any advice on which degausser is king would be gratefully received Thanks, M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted November 17, 2003 Report Share Posted November 17, 2003 Sorry but I have not had the chance to use one. Anyone else? Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted November 17, 2003 Report Share Posted November 17, 2003 Quote: MarkAW said: Hello Nate, Tape drive working A ok. Thanks for the advice - sorry for being a newbie! Any advice on which degausser is king would be gratefully received Thanks, M. You do not need a degausser. Can you use Retrospect's Tools | Configure | Devices and see thdrive listed? If so, right-click on the drve and you should see an "Erase" option. As we speak, I'm doing that with a Travan 4 tape that was recorded by Sonic's BUMP. I chose th evolume name "BooHoo" and the Erase just completed, listing "BooHoo" as the volume name in Tools | Configure | Devices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted November 19, 2003 Report Share Posted November 19, 2003 Hi Normally a standard erase will do. However some DLTs require a bulk erase depending on the application they were used with previously. This is pretty rare though. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mallman Posted November 25, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 25, 2003 Hello Howard, Nate, Many Thanks for the posts. I have been to the tools, devices, configure page, but when I put the tape in, everything is greyed out - it repositions the tape for a bit and then self ejects - on the one occasion I thought I'd been quick enough to hit the erase button whilst the tape was still in the drive (after it un-greyed), I got a bad media error... So, we're going to try the bulk erase way. Happily, we've found someone with a scary machine we can borrow to see if it works I'll post the results.... Many Thanks again, M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted November 26, 2003 Report Share Posted November 26, 2003 Can Windoze Backup deal with the tape? Try that first to verify whether you have a tape drive problem. Also, run diagnostics from the tape drive manufacturer. Might be that you just have a bad tape. I gave up using tapes back in June. Using tapes, it would take over 24 hours to do a full backup/compare on my system, not to mention the annoyance of having to swap tapes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mallman Posted November 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 27, 2003 The tapes I'm trying to overwrite have largely only been used once, and looked after very carefully. The drive is absolutely fine and works without any hitches when using new tapes. The only way we seem to be able to communicate with the tape drive is via retrospect, so I'll be interested if you can tell me how to get 'doze to communicate with the drive by itself. This seems to be a case that the tape was written in a format which our new drive can't deal with... So, it's off to find the bulk eraser..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted November 28, 2003 Report Share Posted November 28, 2003 Quote: MarkAW said: The tapes I'm trying to overwrite have largely only been used once, and looked after very carefully. The drive is absolutely fine and works without any hitches when using new tapes. The only way we seem to be able to communicate with the tape drive is via retrospect, so I'll be interested if you can tell me how to get 'doze to communicate with the drive by itself. This seems to be a case that the tape was written in a format which our new drive can't deal with... So, it's off to find the bulk eraser..... You can use the built-in windoze backup program, unless the built-in backup program does not support your particular drive. ANY tape software, subject to OS security constraints, should be able to overwrite any other tape software's format. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted December 2, 2003 Report Share Posted December 2, 2003 Hi Howard, You are correct, it "should" work that way. In some cases with DLT IVs it just doesn't. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mallman Posted March 31, 2004 Author Report Share Posted March 31, 2004 The Solution Eventually we sent the tapes off for bulk erasing. The first attempt of this also failed, but second time around this worked fine. Apparently there is an additional setting somewhere on the tape, which requires some additional wiping if your tape was originally written by a non-dlt1 drive and you wish to use it in a DLT1... The guys we used for this slight of wrist were www.emaglink.co.uk - speak to Taff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pavman Posted June 17, 2005 Report Share Posted June 17, 2005 www.emaglink.co.uk - I assume that's in the UK. Are you in the US? If so, was there much of a hassle in shipping the tapes (per customs)? And roughly how much did it cost per tape and for how many tapes? (If you don't mind me asking - I have about 40 tapes to erase and I'm trying to figure out if it is more cost effective to get them erase for re-use or just buy brand new tapes. These tapes are montly archives, and haven't been written/rewrittem more than three times - so they have a lot of life left - but Retrospect won't deal with them due to old format) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grosvenor Posted June 21, 2005 Report Share Posted June 21, 2005 i have a similar prob... my company has been using retrospect 5.6 for its daily back-up for a number of years with no problems. however, a couple of weeks ago the old hp LTO 230 tape drive died. we replaced it with the hp 215e drive, but this seems to use a different encoding method... therefor all our old tapes are unreadable. tried to erase them so they could be reused but the drive just spits them out when the auto-backup runs. any ideas? will i need to get them bulk erased/formatted? *note- LTO tape not DLT as above user. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted June 23, 2005 Report Share Posted June 23, 2005 Hi I have never seen this problem with LTO. It has been a known issue with DLT for a long time. So the tapes can't even be read? I know some drives are read compatible with older media but not write compatible. Have you contacted HP support about this? Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jda11560 Posted December 2, 2007 Report Share Posted December 2, 2007 Problem solved, well the problem of Retrospect not liking previously used (by other programs) tapes. Found a little command-line program on Sourceforge; "winmt.exe", only 44Kb in size. I have already used it, pretty simple to use if I could. The only thing might stump you a bit is 'devicename'., this should be "tape0", "tape1" etc, (without the exclamation/commas though. Only commands I used so far is: status, retension, rew, srterase, erase I issued command "winmt -f tape0 srterase", then allowed Retrospect access to tape, come up almost straight away; Status: Erased Download from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/winmt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.