Vertias Problems

[Dmitry Kaminsky]

I am Running a Veritas Backup Exec 9 2003version (sound like "My name is Dmitry and I am an achoholic" doesn't it?) In any case. Running a Veritas Backupexec on W2k Server. About 2 months ago, the tape driver croaked. I have replaced it. For a few days it was working, now, it started to act up again.
It sees EVERY Tape I incert into it as write protected. But it is not as simple as that. It sees them as write protected half way through the back up. The back up is set to run at Midnight. At 17:30, I do a test run, and it comes back as SUCCESSFUL. Then, I come to work at 8:07 am in the morning to be greeted with the following message dated Sept 15: "Please, incert overwritable media into a drive".
What makes it even more frustrating is that right before this alert there is another message, dated Sept 14 23:00pm which states "Overwriting the media named "Thursday". Media overwrite protection is configured to overwrite the allocated media".
I have no idea what to do. The Test Run sees the tape as write enabled. The system at 11:00pm sees the tape as write enabled and at 8:am the media suddenly is write protected and what is more the Back up Job status for 9/14 is "Queued". Please, help out. This is my first job as network admin, and, I have never encountered this problem before. Veritas Manual offers no suggestions and the company refuses to buy techsupport from veritas.

Thank you very much in advance

Dmitry

[Pshedges]

Forgive me but it has been a while since I have used backup exec.

After you run a test backup do you erase the tape again ready for the evenings backups?

If you do not then this tape will not be available for backup that evening as it would already have data on it within it's retention period and therefore backup exec will not see it as available media..

If this is formatted and OK for the evenings backups maybe the tape becomes full during the backup and the backup requires another tape...

Best bet is to cancel all pending, running jobs.
Run a test
Format the tape ready for the evening and see if this works ok.

I have had experiences where the backup jobs became out of synch with the tape changes which presents these sort of issues.
This is assuming that you have a single drive and not a library....

[Jon White]

Replacing tape drives in BE 9 or 10 is a pain. I have found it best to delete the failed tape drive from BE and from Device Manager. Shut down the server. Replace the drive and then bring it back the server back up. Just a tip.

One key question here - are you using the BE drivers or the Windows drivers? It is recommended to use BE drivers these days. Veritas / Symantec also update their drivers all the time. Here's a link for the 9.1 driver update on Windows 2003 for example:

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/273853.htm

What kind of tape drive do you have? Most of the tape drive manufacturers have utilities to troubleshoot the drives and tapes in them which can be helpful too.

[Dmitry Kaminsky]

Thanks for responce folks. But basically it STARTS WRITING, writes for a while. I personally watched it write 12GB of data. Then I leave and when I come back it either says "The media is write protected, please incert the write enabled media", or it says "Please incert a media "Media name" here.

I have not changed the settings neither on the VXA 1 drive nor on VERITAS. For some reason it just STOPPED WORKING