Alright first off I'm not a spring chicken to this Backup Exec software, but this issue has completely baffled me. We have a Dell Windows 2000 Server SP4 with a SDLT tape drive, and was running 8.6 and just recently upgraded to 9.1.
This problem occurs on both versions, but basically what happens (or does not happen) is that Backup Exec will not perform any kind of device operations on the tapes. It will not Inventory, Catalog, Backup, Label, but I believe it will eject (maybe). I have replaced the tape backup drive and SCSI card, but so far nothing has helped. The tape drive will work if I use NTBackup and have completely uninstalled Backup Exec. The failures are immediate, I hit submit and 5 seconds later I get the beep of death and an error saying the operation cannot be performed. Now the great thing is that there are no job logs for the failures. I just get a message saying that BE was "Unable to retrieve the job log" and that's it. There are no errors in the Application event log other than ones that state "an error has occured." Well no duh. After I get the failure from any kind of job the rest of the submitted jobs are forever queued until I restart the server or services. The other great thing is that I can backup to a folder, so it's definitely something with the tape drive and BE not getting along.
Here is a list of things I have tried and/or checked on:
1. Replaced tape drive and SCSI card
2. Flashed tape drive and SCSI card to latest firmware/drivers
3. The server is not "Paused"
4. Upgraded to BE 9.1 SP1
5. Upgraded to latest tape device drivers from Veritas
6. Removed any kind of interaction with the Removeable Storage service and have even tried disabling the service
7. Bought and used new DLT tape and a new cleaning tape
8. Prayer
The only problem I can see is that when BE installs sometimes it says I have no XML driver, but I have installed MSXML 3 from Microsoft and regsrv32'd it. Does the msxml.dll need to be running while BE is running too? When I list the registered DLL's in the System Information screen the MSXML DLL is usually not listed as being loaded. This might be a red herring but in the interest of full disclosure I thought I'd put it in, and like I said I CAN backup to NTBackup so it isn't anything between Windows 2000 and the tape drive.
Any ideas?
Zach
