Summary
You may have several tapes in a media pool that are marked as 'new'. When a job runs and chooses one of these new tapes, the job appears to load the tape properly but then fails, citing a tape positioning error.
Symptoms
Attempting to label the new tape may result in log messages similar to the following:
192.168.99.10 sstptmm Sat Aug 16 11:24:52 2008 SNBTMM5461O Node(ServerA) drive(LTO4Drive) volser(VOL005) partition(1) mount rc=(1108)
After the unsuccessful mount from labeling on the fly, you may also see the following for subsequent volser mount requests:
192.168.99.10 sstptmm Sat Aug 16 11:23:52 2008 SNBTMM5462O Attempting mount for node(ServerA) drive(LTO4Drive) volser(VOL005)
192.168.99.10 sstptmm Sat Aug 16 11:24:52 2008 SNBTMM5461O Node(ServerA) drive(LTO4Drive) volser(VOL005) partition(1) mount rc=(1111)
192.168.99.10 ssevthnd Sat Aug 16 11:24:52 2008 SNBEHT4204E *** Error mounting VOL005 on device LTO4Drive [status: 1111 (error positioning tape)] ***
192.168.99.10 ssevthnd Sat Aug 16 11:24:52 2008 SNBEHT4355E Leaving volser VOL005 marked in-use or in-mount so that it will not be reused until all active jobs are done.
Labeling a tape on the fly appears to succeed, but if you attempt to locate to the first partition, it fails. Subsequent use of this same tape will fail. Manually formatting and labeling may enable use of the tape.