Tape drive media detected as write protected

Environment

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
  • HP Ultrium 6-SCSI tape drive.

Issue

• LTO6 (Linear Tape-Open) tape detects media as write protected. Same media gets detected as writeable in other drive.

Resolution

• Issue was resolved by tape device/Hardware vendor.

Root Cause

• The tape drive mt returns bit code WR_PROT set which means the tape (or drive) is write-protected. For some drives this can also mean that the drive does not support writing on the current medium type.

# mt -f /dev/nst3 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=-1, block number=-1, partition=0.
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x0 (default).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (4050000):
 WR_PROT DR_OPEN IM_REP_EN

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