data protector red tapes

As someone who has to work with what HP thinks passes as backup software (for another couple weeks at least), I can attest that you don't need to worry about what Data Protector says about your media state. It doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. that particular tape got marked bad as a result of the errors registered on it, independent of whether or not those errors are due to bad media, corrupt source data, a drive that needs cleaning... or even a network hiccup, and anything else that could possibly create a write or read error to or from the tape.

So, really, the media state flag is useless, and will only prevent a poor (red colored) tape from being used for backups. To reset the flag on any tape to good (green), including those that are fair (yellow) or unknown (grey), open a command line and navigate to \bin\ under the Data Protector install directory, and then issue omnimm -reset_poor_medium [medium_id], as in the screenshot below, which shows me setting a fair tape named AK0722L3 back to good.