How to check if a medium (f.e. DLT,SDLT) is valid?

[Richard Kupca]

Hello,
does anybody know and use a software by which it's possible to check a medium (if it isn't damaged)? When I backup, some of my mediums are getting poor and I think, they are bad.

My conf: Windows2000 Server, Data Protector A.50, Library - MSL5026SL.

Thank you for responses...

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,

If the media is in DP format you can use the verifiy function in DP. Select a drive or library slot and click right mouse button. Data Protector check if the media is a readable and a DP or OmniBack medium.

If a media is marked as bad in DP, it is rather unlikley that it is physically bad (at least with DLT,SDLT or Ultrium medias). It is more common there has been some communication or SCSI error when backup was running. A such media can be reinitialized and used again.

[Marino Meloni_1]

Hi,
another option is tu use StorageWorks Library and tapetools, there is a test related to the drive called "Media Validation Test".
This test is abòe tp tell you if the media is good or bad, without affecting data on it

mari

[David Ruska]

The media validation is a "read only" test, but it's not really very good at checking if a tape is truly good. It only reads a fixed amount of data, and doesn't report any soft error information. It was intended to see if the tape is "readable", but not determine how readable it is (and doesn't read the whole tape).

If you can overwrite the tape, the better test to run is the "read/write" test. Under the options you can select the amount of data to write, and at the end it will report transfer rate performance, which is a good measure of error rate. You can also go to the support ticket and look at the read/write error counters (as long as the tape is still loaded).