Commvault Problem recognizing new tapes.

Hi,

Well, first are you sure the tapes inserted are from the same generation than your LTO drive ?

Ultrium drives cannot use tapes from a higher generation than they are.

Like if you insert an LTO8 tape inside a LTO7 drive, this could behave like this.

You can also use the tapetoolgui to check the status and information of the drive/tape.

Can you detail a bit more if this is all brand new, or after some change, and any environment information could help ?

Laurent.

Hi Laurent, 

Thanks for your quick response. it is an LTO7 drive and LTO7 tape and it is new one and behaving for all the tapes on the site. we checked physically tapes are not write protected but on commvault console, it shows bad and write protected. 

@Allan0105 , can you try and look at the tape via the tape tool gui?  If it’s ALL tapes, then there could be an issue with the drive (though I don't know how many drives you have here….and are they all having the issue)?

When did this start happening?  Anything change between last know working and no longer working?

Thanks!

Thanks Mike for your help! it has four drive and all the tapes are having same issue and this is new tapes which we inserted. nothing as changed as of now. I tried using tape tool gui for read but it is giving error as write protected. 

Ahh, ok!  Is this a batch of brand new tapes?  It’s not unheard of to get a bad batch.

Do any existing tapes work as expected? 

Yeah Mike, existing tapes are working fine but the new batch of 60 tapes is not working, when we insert into the TL , it shows tape bad and write protected, when i made the tape good manually, jobs is picking the tape and it is waiting in the phase as writing oml then again making tape to bad & write protected, drive is visible on the MA and configured correctly. when we tried to run tapetoolGUI, it is giving error as specified file is not available. 

when we checked with tape vendor, he says tape if fine and working so we are stuck, is there a way to test the tape out of commvault to elimate the commvault out of equation. Only thing, we didnt do it deleted the TL and re-recreating, if you have some docs for it. please share. we will do that as well. 

The best test is the tape tool gui.  You can see what tools the hardware vendor has, though all of the evidence points to a bad batch.

What makes them say the tapes are working fine?  You can’t use them…..can the vendor show you that they can write to these tapes?

Thanks Mike for your help here! 

Tape took Gui is not working for some reason but not sure why and also tape vendor checked the tape physically and said tape is good but they don't have any tools to write data to tape so we have opened an case with commvault as well as tape vendor. will update here , how it goes. 

Keep me posted.  Not sure how the vendor is confirming the tapes work without writing to them….

Can you share the case number so I can track and follow i?

Sure, Please find the case number :- 220303-450

Looks like the engineer is providing solid evidence for you.

I’ll keep an eye on this one!

Hey Mike,

Agree! today I got an update from the customer today that they found an problem with the SKM server and aux copies are running but still on the first set of tapes. we are keeping eye on the second set of tapes but i am not exactly sure what is this SKM Server? any idea? I am waiting for customer availability to jump on webex and check this. 

Not 100%, but I’d assume this:

https://www.quantum.com/en/service-support/downloads-and-firmware/skm/

Thanks for sharing back!!