All Tapes are write protected

[Michael Zehr]

Hi,

I've got a HP Ultrium-2 SCSI Drive, I think the "official" name is the TradeReady Ultrium 448.
We used to back data up with Arcserve. Since the reports are totally useless and there isn't so much data we switched to BackupAssist which is basically a better GUI for ntbackup. Arcserve was uninstalled, RSM was enabled and everything ran smooth for a few days. Since then, every backup fails because every tape I insert is reported to be write protected. I even inserted a fresh tape, and its write protected. LTT reports the drive as healthy, but I'm also not able to perform any kind of write operation on any tape. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Bye, Michael

[thomasr]

That is a bit odd. Do you have a used, but not-important, tape you could put in and attempt to read?

Oh, if you have not explicitly formatted the tapes, that could be the problem. Were you ever able to write to tapes with BackupAssist?

Have you tried the device tests in L&TT? There are a number of tape drive tests for reading, as well as the chance to generate a support ticket.

If this is a trade-ready drive... perhaps it's just telling you that it's ready for you to trade it in?

[Michael Zehr]

Hi,

I agree, this is really odd. Unfortunately I'm perfectly able to read any tape and to restore data. But every attempt to write anything, to format the tape with LT&T or to simply move it in the free media pool fails because the drive reports the tape (every tape, even brandnew ones) to be write protected.

Thx for help