SDLT600 drives: Blanking tapes or marking tapes for reuse results in 0 space (4046696)

Title: Blanking tapes or marking tapes for reuse leave tapes with 0 space left on tape when using an SDLT600 tape drive
Date: 12/06
NV Version: ANY
OS Version: ANY
Application version: N/A
Plugin version: N/A

Description:
Caveats when using SDLT600 tape drives and links to firmware revisions fixing the problems

Symptoms:
When writing tapes in an SDLT600 tape drive, new tapes can be written, but when blanking tapes or marking them for reuse, the tape is reported with 0 bytes space left, and as a result of this a tape can not be written to again.
This is for Quantum SDLT600 tape drive, HP StorageWorks SDLT600 Tape Drives, SDLT tape drives in Quantum PX502 libraries and SDLT tape drives in Sun StorageTek libraries, as well as standalone Sun/StorageTek StorEdge SDLT600 tape drives.

OUTPUT IN BINARY LOG
Information 2006/12/12 13:05:56 31 Media FMP Position media 'BLANK' to segment 0 in 'FMP: 3-0.5.0 (QUANTUM SDLT600):FMP' succeeded
Background 2006/12/12 13:05:56 31 Media FMP Drive 'FMP: 3-0.5.0 (QUANTUM SDLT600):FMP' write header
Information 2006/12/12 13:06:19 31 Media FMP Wrote header successfully
Background 2006/12/12 13:06:19 31 Media FMP Position media 'FMP 12 Dec 13:05-1' to segment 0 in 'FMP: 3-0.5.0 (QUANTUM SDLT600):FMP'
Information 2006/12/12 13:06:19 31 Media FMP Position media 'FMP 12 Dec 13:05-1' to segment 0 in 'FMP: 3-0.5.0 (QUANTUM SDLT600):FMP' succeeded
Background 2006/12/12 13:06:19 31 Media FMP Drive 'FMP: 3-0.5.0 (QUANTUM SDLT600):FMP' verify header
Information 2006/12/12 13:06:19 31 Media FMP Drive 'FMP: 3-0.5.0 (QUANTUM SDLT600):FMP' has expected media 'FMP 12 Dec 13:05-1'
Background 2006/12/12 13:06:19 31 Media FMP Media does not have enough space
Warning 2006/12/12 13:06:19 31 Media FMP No suitable media for job 31 instance 3
Information 2006/12/12 13:07:06 0 Media FMP Media request was diagnosed

DIAGNOSIS FROM TRACE
1) The dri

This is a firmware problem that can be resolved by upgrading to the latest firmware available.

Standalone QUANTUM SDLT600 Drive, Firmware v43 (2B2B) addresses this problem:
http://www.quantum.com/ServiceandSupport/SoftwareandDocumentationDownloads/SDLT600/Index.aspx#Firmware

QUANTUM SDLT600 Drives in a PX502 library, Firmware v37 addresses this problem:
http://www.quantum.com/ServiceandSupport/SoftwareandDocumentationDownloads/PX502/Index.aspx

HP StorageWorks SDLT 600 Tape Drive, the latest available Firmware is v41 (2929) and does not address this problem. HP does not seem to release new firmware versions anymore, as the tape drive is EOL. A solution is to downgrade to the firmware the drive was tested with (v35, 2323).

Sun/StorageTek StorEdge SDLT600 Tape Drive, Firmware v43 (2B2B) should address this problem: http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-21-118170-04-1