Please help: A failure occurred querying the Writer status

[Reid_Li]

Hi there,
I'm a support engineer in Microsoft, and my Customer meet a problem of Veritas Backup Exec 10.

It's Windows 2003 SP1, Exchange 2003 SP1, Veritas Backup Exec 10 fully patched.

I let him test the NTBackup to backup the Exchange database. It works properly.

However, every evening, he may get an error form Veritas Backup Exec 10 as following:

"The job failed with the following error: A failure occurred querying the Writer status."
"Writer Name: Exchange Server, Writer ID: {76FE1AC4-15F7-4BCD-987E-8E1ACB462FB7}, Last error: The VSS Writer failed, but the operation can be retried (0x800423f3), State: Failed during prepare backup operation (7). Consult your Microsoft documentation for details. Check the Windows Event Viewer for corresponding application or system errors."

I have searched the internet and found in a newgroup that this issue can be resolved by hot fix KB826936 and KB833167. However, these two hot fixes are included in Windows 2003 SP1.

Please help me resolve this issue. Thanks very much.

Below is the Customer's words
=======================================
I am running Exchange 2003, SP1 on a Windows 2003, SP1 server. I am using Veritas Backup Exec 10 fully patched. I am having failures in my backups from a query writer error. The failures occurs every evening. Here is a copy of the error code, "The job failed with the following error: A failure occurred querying the Writer status." A more detailed error is as follows, "Writer Name: Exchange Server, Writer ID: {76FE1AC4-15F7-4BCD-987E-8E1ACB462FB7}, Last error: The VSS Writer failed, but the operation can be retried (0x800423f3), State: Failed during prepare backup operation (7). Consult your Microsoft documentation for details. Check the Windows Event Viewer for corresponding application or system errors."
After multiple attempts at fixing this, I came across several different postings from MSFT to contact them and get patches 826936 and 833167.

I appreciate any assistance that I can get for this problem.

Thank you.
Operating System:Windows 2003

[Reid_Li]

anyone can answer?

And please confirm it's a Veritas problem more than an Exchange problem, since NTBackup works properly.

Please give me the contact information of your Support.

E-mail and Phone.

Thanks.

[Reid_Li]

i need an answer....anyone can help?

[Amruta_Purandar]

Hello,

Please refer the following technotes which will help you troubleshoot this issue.
Title:
How to troubleshoot the error "A failure occurred querying the Writer status" (a000fed1 HEX or e000fed1 HEX) using VSSADMIN
http://support.veritas.com/docs/261993

Title:
The backup of shadow copy components fails with the error "0xe000fed1 - A failure occurred querying the Writer status."
http://support.veritas.com/docs/274993

For telephone contact please refer the following website.
http://support.veritas.com/

NOTE : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked
assumed answered and would be moved to answered questions pool.

[Reid_Li]

Thanks.
i will let the Customer try it.

[Jim_Millard_2]

My setup is a bit different, with BE10 on Win2K/SP4, yet I have the exact same symptoms, including the specific state for VSS (7). The troubleshooting articles refer to VSS errors resulting in a different state (9) and had no effect.

An additional piece of data: the event that shows up on the Exchange server when the backup commences has Event ID: 9607.

The description in the event details is: "Error code 0x50d when preparing for backup."

More telling, the data portion of the error message contains the following: "Backup in progress."

Using NTBackup on the Exchange server works fine (it uses the streaming API, however) and totally disabling AOFO allows the backup to run. Further, this is only applicable to backing up the message store itself; backing up the individual mailboxes is an error-free process.