Why VOLCNT=000 on the volumes chained ?

Products

• TLMS Tape Management

Issue/Introduction

Receiving message CAT6203W with VOLCNT=000.

Resolution

The CAT6203W is issued when TLMSVCVS finds a chain that appears that it was not properly closed (VOLCNT=000).  The VOLCNT=000 is an indicator that is used by TLMS processing to show that a chain is not yet complete.  

 

This prevents movements of a partial chain by TLMSTRS for example, and will also be reported on the TLMSTRS Error Exception Report.  This is not really a chaining error, but rather a warning that the chain does not appear to have been completed correctly.  This is generally due to an abend at volume mount time, when close has completed for the previous volume and the next volume  does not open properly.

 

The two major causes of this are operator cancel at tape mount time and S837-08 abends due to the number of volumes exceeding the space allocated in the IBM control blocks (controlled by the volume count in the VOL parameter of the DD statement).  In this case, we do not see a  "close end of file" (not "close end of volume") and the chain appears to be open.  

 

Also, if TLMSTRS or TLMSVCVS runs while a chain is being created, the errors will be transient as the chain will close after the utility runs.  In the case of TRS, the situation protects against processing an incomplete chain.  In the case of TLMSVCVS, the chain will be closed when the job closes the output file.                                                      

 

To correct these messages you need to update the first volume of the chain with:

 UPV vvvvv,expdt=60002  knowing that these chains may or may not be valid data.