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I am using HP Data Protector A.06.11 in my organization, with HP EML E-SeriesEML library, with 4 drives using LTO-4 tapes, and i am having some problems.

Yesterday I put 5 new tapes in the robot and formatted them. At that time, the robot got just those empty 5 tapes with empty space. (all the rest of the tapes are red, or with protection)

Today in the morning after the night (1 backup run at night), and 2 of the new tapes are red (the properties are):

Writes : 2
Overwrites : 1
Errors : 9

I format one of them, and check for each drive if the tape become red, no one of the drives do it.

In the main pool properties, in media condition got:

Valid for : 36 (months)
Maximum overwrites : 250
U. Windl
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    Please: what, exactly, is your question? If it's just "why is this happening", could you give any reasons why it might be anything other than "I bought a bad batch of tapes"? – MadHatter Aug 09 '12 at 09:20
  • Run a cleaning cartridge? – ewwhite Aug 09 '12 at 10:09

3 Answers3

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As someone who has to work with what HP thinks passes as backup software (for another couple weeks at least), I can attest that you don't need to worry about what Data Protector says about your media state. It doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. that particular tape got marked bad as a result of the errors registered on it, independent of whether or not those errors are due to bad media, corrupt source data, a drive that needs cleaning... or even a network hiccup, and anything else that could possibly create a write or read error to or from the tape.

So, really, the media state flag is useless, and will only prevent a poor (red colored) tape from being used for backups. To reset the flag on any tape to good (green), including those that are fair (yellow) or unknown (grey), open a command line and navigate to \bin\ under the Data Protector install directory, and then issue omnimm -reset_poor_medium [medium_id], as in the screenshot below, which shows me setting a fair tape named AK0722L3 back to good.

Poor flag reset

HopelessN00b
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  • Before hard-resetting an error condition, the better approach is to examine where the error came from. Also the first step to do is to "Verify" the medium from the "Devices & Media" context. – U. Windl Jul 27 '21 at 09:05
  • Be aware that the software is having a hard time to decide whether it's a tape problem or a drive problem when being unable to read a tape. Data Protector cannot flag drives as "poor", but it has mechanisms for automatic cleaning of the drive. *Did you set the "Detect dirty drive" flag for the drive?* The docs say: "When Data Protector receives notification that the drive needs cleaning, it automatically loads the cleaning tape, cleans the drive and then resumes the session. All cleaning activities are logged in the cleaning.log file residing in the Data Protector server log files directory." – U. Windl Jan 09 '23 at 12:39
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Most likely the reason for the "poor" (red) state can be found in (UNIX path given here) /var/opt/omni/server/log/media.log.

U. Windl
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Well, it depends. I really think you should do a tape drive clean process, with a cleaning tape, before the following.

You can "reset" the poor tape status by issuing the following command:

omnimm -reset_poor_medium [medium_id]

And then verify the tape so it may reset the error condition (if it was a false positive), or the tape is indeed bad.

Dave M
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rm3na
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