Unable to eject Dell RD1000 cartridge

Greetings,

 

Anyone had issues ejecting Dell RD1000 cartridges (40Gb through 200Gb hard-disk based removeable carts) when used as a backup target for BESR recovery points?

 

The drive works great, but when it comes time to switch cartridges, the eject button does nothing.  An attempt to eject the cartridge via My Computer gives "Error ejecting the media.  It could be in use".

 

When the BESR service is stopped, the cartridge can be immediately ejected on the first try.

 

Once BESR is started again, the eject capability is once again lost.

 

It strikes me that Symantec is "locking" the drive open, even when not in the middle of a recovery point creation--basically when it has no business touching the drive. 

 

This is a bad practice, as it is disallowing other system processes (like "eject" ) from using that drive, and makes this product virtually impossible to use as a viable backup product that allows for off-site backup strategies.  I understand that BESR is primarily targeted at "non-removeable" media, but a good backup strategy necessitates that we also have off-site swaps of the target media.  So this product is pretty well useless for single-server bare metal backups that can be taken off-site--at least in convenient form--without buying other backup products and drives to back up the target data (i.e. BESR creates the image file, then some second backup product backs up the image file to a removeable cartridge.)  Geez, what a hassle.

 

Any help?

 

-Dan