-----Skylar Thompson wrote: ----- >Our library got confused about a month ago, and started reporting >tapes being in the wrong slots. This caused a couple tapes to have >labels that are inconsistent with their barcodes and are in use by >other tapes. I audited the "real" volumes, and didn't find anything >wrong, so I don't think anything actually got written to these >other volumes. I'm trying to return them to the scratch state, but >TSM won't let me because before it labels them it reads the on-tape >label rather than the barcode (even though I give label libv "overwrite=yes" and "labelsource=barcode"), and the on-tape >label is already in a storage pool. Is there any way to really >force TSM to overwrite the on-tape labels?
I think you will have to use non-TSM facilities to remove the existing labels. For example, if your host system is Unix you could use dd to overwrite the beginning of the tape. You will probably have to update a drive, path, or both to 'online=no' before you will be able to use the drive with non-TSM tape handling software. Depending on the tape technology, you might be able to use a bulk eraser to remove the labels. This approach will not work for tapes that depend on factory-supplied formatting, such as IBM Magstartapes.
