Preparing disk media in an RXDA equipped appliance may return: "Failed: 1 drive was added; prepare media manually to use this configuration"

SUMMARY

Cold backup copies may fail with the message: "Failed: 1 drive was added; prepare media manually to use this configuration."

ISSUE

Customers may receive a cold copy failure result indicating "Failed: 1 drive was added; prepare media manually to use this configuration"  In this case, when using an RXDA, the media will also fail manual preparation.  

RESOLUTION

One of 2 processes are necessary to resolve this issue:

1. Use the Cold Copy Report from the reports tab.  Run the report for an appropriate range and locate cold backups that contain the current serial number of drive  (if the "serials" column is not displayed in your UI, use the hamburger icon at the right of the column names to enable it's view).  Locate a recent cold copy containing the serial number you have and make note of the other serial numbers used in that same job.  Locate those other physical devices and insert them all in your RXDA and then manually prepare the media.  Note: this will erase all archives on that media and also erase historical record of those archives.  You shoudl then be able to re-prepare the selected disk with a different set of alternate disks. 

2. Override the media saftey check: 

bputil -p Archive SkipSerialCheck 1 /usr/bp/bpinit/master.ini

bputil -p Archive SkipSerialCheck 0 /usr/bp/bpinit/master.ini

CAUSE

The backup appliance knows which disk Serial Numbers have been used in prior archive sets.  When a single disk from one older set is attempted to be used in a new archive set with different disks, a check is made that protects the user from accidentally erasing that older disk as part of the process of creating the new set.  

The correct process is to load the old disk set using the original drive configuration and prepare that media, which will erase prior known configurations of that media.  The alternative is to remove known prior disks sets using the UI feature if the original disks are not know.  Some customers may not wish to perform these processes and wish the saftey check to be disabled to allow any combination of disks to be prepared even if that means the loss of ability to recover prior archives.  10.1 provides that manual setting option.