Colorado Backup II - 2

[Mike Hall]

Spec: PII/PIII, 64Mb+ RAM, Colorado 8Gb Int, Windows NT 4.0 SP5
Another problem I am more and more having to deal with is that when the Backup Job does run when scheduled. It hangs during the backup process. So when the users logon the job has been running 8 or 9 hours. The only way to shut it down is go into Task Manager and end the Process.
Any Ideas would be gratefully received.

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage>General to Tape Libraries and Drives. -HP Forum Moderator

[Eric de Lange_2]

What version of CBII is installed on this machine ? Also, what apps/utils are running on this machine ? I have seen erratic scheduler behavior with users that had a whole load of apps running including a virus scanner.

Another thing is power management. Could it be that the PC/disk goes into powersave mode ?

The latest version of CBII is version 9, just released.

Cheers,

Caliban

[Carl Fisher]

I have been having a serious nightmare with the same issue. We have approximately 40 HP Colorado 8GB drives and almost half now are either not even cataloguing the tape, or taking 8-14 hours to complete a simple 1Gb backup. Most systems are running 98SE with pretty basic installs of common software (Office, IE, etc...) New tape drives work fine for about a month or so and then start to die.

We are using these tapes for a full system backup nightly. Since HP says "DO NOT" clean the tape heads, what else could be causing this?

Thanks, Carl

[Sander Hoppe]

Dear Mike and Carl,

A freeze, lock, crash or slow hangup during a backup, even when the first part of the backup went fine, is frequently caused by a SCSI hardware problem.
Especially in Carls case I am sure that this is the most likely cause.
Please check the SCSI controller, cables and termination by replacing each of those elements one at the time, as far as possible in your respective cases.
I hope this works for you.
Regards,

Sander Hoppe

[Carl Fisher]

Ok, the magic fix from HP is to Initialize the tape and do a back to back retension of the tape after every 3-4 uses of each tape.

So for us, on a 2 week rotation, we need to do this every month or so (which is about the time this all started, approx. one month after installing them.)

This fix seems to be working fine so far.