Forum Discussion

dfeifer's avatar
dfeifer
Level 4
12 years ago

Backup Exec 2012 not receiving tape alerts?

Backup exec 2012 patched up to date

Adaptec 29320LPE Ultra320 SCSI

Quantum SuperLoader 3 LTO-4 model L700 Tape drive.

 

I have had some weird flakiness going on with our drive lately when it comes to the Drive Requires Cleaning Alert. 

Basicly This only seems to happen during our weekend full backups. 17 servers are backed up between 8pm friday night and 2-3 pm sunday. Generally all but Our File/Print server take less then an hour to backup. The File/print server takes roughly 28hrs by itself. We recently had some data corruption on our fp server so the existing tape library was put to vault and new tapes were purchased. Before we had to clean the drive maybe once a month. Now it seems to need it once or twice a week. Probably until the tapes break in. 

 

The Issue is that when the tape flag pops up BE does not appear to get notified. The tape drive automatically dismounts the tape, but is not inserting the cleaning tape. No alerts appear in BE and Looking at the job log it appears to be chugging along, though with the throughput continually dropping, I have to manually move the cleaning tape from slot 1 to the drive to clean it. Afterward I moved a scratch tape to the drive but BE never picked up where it left off. (which happened to be the process of grabbing a new tape for the set since the previous one had been filled.)  

 

After this has happened and the Job fails or I cancel it. Every other job for the weekend fails. (Job starts, tape is pulled from the magazine to the drive, The job starts and begins to write and then within 3-4 seconds the tape drive goes idle , throughput drops to zero, and the job fails with V-79-57344-34036 - An unknown error has occured. A device attached to the system is not functioning. Once I poweroff and resart the drive and the server things work fine until the cleaning tape is needed again.

 

I replaced the Cleaning tape last week because I read that if the tape had too many uses this would deactivate the tape drive autocleaning. This did not appear to work.

I also updated the firmware, updated the drivers (Originally we did not have any drivers for the drive installed in windows. These were installed using the symantec tapeinst program) and updated the driver for the adaptec scsi card. I would appreciate any help. My only work around right now is to cycle the cleaning tape through the drive every friday before the jobs begin.

 

2012
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Configuring
  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    12 years ago

    If a tape drive repeatedly asked to be cleaned despite being cleaned recently, then it is faulty and needs to be replaced.  To convince the tape drive vendor, you can run their diagnostic utility against the tape drve.  Make sure that you select the write test and that you have stopped the BE services beforehand.  Even if the tape drive passes the utility test and it may, you still need to get it replaced.  Failing the utility test just makes it easier to convince the vendor.

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    12 years ago

    If a tape drive repeatedly asked to be cleaned despite being cleaned recently, then it is faulty and needs to be replaced.  To convince the tape drive vendor, you can run their diagnostic utility against the tape drve.  Make sure that you select the write test and that you have stopped the BE services beforehand.  Even if the tape drive passes the utility test and it may, you still need to get it replaced.  Failing the utility test just makes it easier to convince the vendor.

  • dfeifer's avatar
    dfeifer
    Level 4
    12 years ago

    This tape drive is backing up 23 servers. 3.2TB on the weekend fulls and 600-800 gigs on the daily incrementals. Jobs start friday night at 8pm and usually finish around 6am monday which seems a little slow for what this drive can suposedly do anyways. Besides the random Storage device "Tape drive 0001" reported an error on a request to write data to media. The verify jobs are "seeking" literally for 30 minutes before it finally finds the start point and starts the verify which takes maybe 3-5 minutes on the small servers to complete.

    Is this yet another sign of the drive going bad? Was curious whether a bad firmware/driver could cause this kind of problem. I updated our LTO4 superloader 3 with hp drive to the current drivers and firmware from quantum before and then deleted those and rolled back to the symantec drivers. Though I am more worried about possibly having loaded the wrong firmware in the device? It is currently using the B63Z Firmware from quantum. Should I have gone to hp and gotten the firmware from them since it is an hp drive?

  • Mohd__Arshad's avatar
    Mohd__Arshad
    Level 2
    12 years ago

    This could be a Hardware issue,

    Make sure that the device drivers are latest Symantec drivers. Medium changer in the Device manager will be using the Unknown Medium Changer drivers provided by the Operating System.

    Check your Event viewer for EVENT ID: 7,9,11 or 15 (These all relate to hardware issues)

    In case if you are facing hardware issue then you may refer to the following technote for hardware problems.

     

    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH24414 : How to troubleshoot issues with a Robotic Library (autoloader/changer) and/or Tape Drive(s)

    If all this does not fix the issue. Create a ticket with support.

  • dfeifer's avatar
    dfeifer
    Level 4
    12 years ago

    Drivers and firmware were up to date and we replaced both the cable and scsi card to make sure that those were not the cause. After this we were still getting failed backups due to device error and they were getting more frequent so we replaced the drive with a superloader 3 lto5 drive. After tweaking the settings my backup test on the media server and attached raid of 1.2 TB finished in just over 2 hours running at 15000 MB/ min definately worlds better then our old drive.