Tape erase - invalid block size

[TomaszB]

Sorry

I tried to change block size in GUI and in registry, with no result.

thx

[Moebius]

I had Veeam support remoting into my environment twice, with no results.
The suggested registry change brought no improvements.

After asking the same questions more times and receiving several logs from my side, their final word was that "the tapes were written with a product that made them unreadable by Veeam" or something similar.
Which I find rather strange, given that
a. the product in question was IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, quite widespread I believe, and
b. the mt.exe application was always able to "fix" each tape instantly (I don't even think it really makes access to the tape, since it takes literally no time to return the prompt).

I have no more tapes showing the problem as I've had to "fix" them with mt.exe and use all of them for the backups. I waited for more than two weeks before using the last ones, in order to leave support time to investigate, but apparently to no avail.
The case is now closed with no results, and with no satisfaction from my side. Sure, I could always use mt.exe, but this is just a workaround as somebody said, not a solution.
First time I am disappointed by the Veeam support.

[Dima P.]

Lucio,

I appreciate your input and sorry to hear that the issue was not resolved. I’ll ask DEVs to review your case and investigate what can be done for our side. Stay tuned.

[joystick]

Hello,

If you are "lucky" to have IBM TS3100 or TS3200 library and your tapes were previously used by IBM TSM then you may not be able to complete erase of tapes from VBR9.

In order to reuse tapes in VBR9 I had to use IBM Tape Diagnostic Tool (ITDT) to erase tapes. This takes lots of hours (about 4-5 for LTO-5) but this makes tape usable by VBR.



HTH.

[Vodochnik]

Just addition, due to another veeam error I was needed to use IBM ITDT.
After "playing" with tapes with ITDT, veeam was unable to short erase them with error: Failed to erase tape Failed to detect tape block size.

Erasing them with ITDT has solved the problem, and ITDT supports short erase: