Question : Problem: Tapes showing up as Unknown Media and seeing Cyclic Redundancy errors in event log

Ok, Just got a new tape drive Dell SDLT320. When I installed symantec's driver from website, the driver shows as "QUANTUM SDLT320" even though it says Dell on the physical tape drive. Is this normail?

Anyways, the main question is. I have about 10 Quantum Super DLT 1 tapes that all show up as "UNKNOWN MEDIA" when I run an inventory. These are refurbished tapes but am a little doubtful all of these tapes are bad. I tried doing a QUICK ERASE MEDIA with no luck. I am also seeing many event log errors in the system log as follows-

SOURCE: dlttape-VRTS
EVENT ID: 7
DESCRIPTION: The device, \Device\Tape0, has a bad block.

One funny thing is that 1 of the 10 tapes seems to inventory as a "blank tape" and I was able to label it and was even able to run a full backup. The next night this tape failed with the error "Error reading/writing data from/to the media." and showed the same dlt-VRTS errors in the system log the same as the other 9 tapes.

Answer : Problem: Tapes showing up as Unknown Media and seeing Cyclic Redundancy errors in event log

The drive is made my Quantum with a change to the outside and firmware as per Dell standards. So it is perfectly normal for it to show up as Quantum.

Spend the money for a new Quantum or Maxell tape and see how it works. Chances are there is a problem with those tapes.

I also recommend getting a copy of StorageCare Sage xTalk Management Console
http://cp-quantum.talismaonline.com/display/2n/articleDirect/index.asp?aid=1306&r=0.7547571

With it you can run diagnostics on the drive.