Remove Tape from drive

The technical support forum for Firestreamer (the virtual tape library).
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boaa
Posts: 3
Joined: 12 Dec 2011, 16:36

Post by boaa »

I am using DPM 2010 with Firestreamer 4.0.0. It appears that one of my tapes in stuck in one of my drives. DPM tells me that it's offsite ready, but it's still in the drive. Firestreamer also lists it in the drive when I look under current state. In this situation with a physical library I would just move it manually from the drive to the proper storage slot and tell DPM to re-inventory. Is there are way to manually move the tape in Firestreamer?
jsf
Cristalink Support
Posts: 300
Joined: 29 Aug 2010, 09:03

Post by jsf »

Firestreamer doesn't move tapes on its own. I would expect Microsoft DPM to move a tape from a tape drive to a storage slot when the tape is "offsite ready". If it doesn't happen, you may want to ask Microsoft Support why.

Just try to unload this particular tape by updating the media layout. If the tape is not locked by DPM, then it will be unloaded, no problem. If the tape is locked, then you may have come across a bug in DPM, see http://support.cristalink.com/forum/vie ... hp?f=3&t=9. In this case, you can forcibly unload the tape (Firestreamer will prompt you for this).

Note that Firestreamer tries to preserve the location of current tapes when you apply a new media layout. For example, if you have a tape in a tape drive, and you load a new media layout that has the same tape in an unnumbered storage slot, then the tape will stay in the tape drive after the new layout is applied. This is to prevent the disruption of a current backup that may be using the tape. To move the tape, you need either to unload it first then load again into a new location, or to specify a particular (numbered) location for the tape in the new media layout.
Best regards,
John Smith
Cristalink Support
boaa
Posts: 3
Joined: 12 Dec 2011, 16:36

Post by boaa »

Thanks. I got this resolved. Here is what I did for future reference.

I unlocked my library and unloaded the media map. Firestreamer told me the drive was locked and asked if I wanted to force it to unload, which I said yes to since there were no tape jobs running. I then locked the library and did an inventory. This got the "tape" back into the proper storage slot, but DPM told me there was still a unknown tape in that same drive. I tried the SQL database suggestion that js linked to, but that didn't work for me since all those values were already 0 in my case. I rebooted the server which also didn't help. Rescanning didn't help. A suggestion from Microsoft for cases like this with physical libraries was to power down the library. So, I unlocked the library again, unloaded the mediamap and locked the library without reloading my mediamap. That did the trick. I then unlocked, reloaded the map, locked and all was right with the world again.
jsf
Cristalink Support
Posts: 300
Joined: 29 Aug 2010, 09:03

Post by jsf »

Thank you for your follow-up.
Best regards,
John Smith
Cristalink Support
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