Tapes not ejecting or inventorying

[Jack_Dorsey]

Greetings All,

Running Backup Exec 12.5

I have found an issue that started happening this Monday morning where I can no longer run Inventory or Eject Jobs on my Quantum DLT-VS1 tape drives.  I have the Symantec drivers installed on these drives and my 12.5 install of Backup Exec has been running flawlessly for 6 months.  I did not make any system changes this past weekend.  The only thing that happened this past weekend was my routine 2 jobs ran successfully.

When I try to perform an Eject operation, I click on the Job Monitor tab and can see the job running, and running, and running.  This can go on for 5 hours if I let it.  A cancel operation does not work.  I have to reboot the server and eject the tapes by pressing the eject button on the drives.  The Eject Jobs both show a status of "Queued" and the "pause" indicator shows on the jobs.

Similarly, the same happens when I try to perform an Inventory Job.  

My routine nightly backup jobs all run sucessfully without issues.

Any ideas on this?  I've rebooted the server twice since this began happening.

Thanks, Jack

[Lance_Daschle]

You didn't mention, but did you try to turn off/on the tape device?  I only suggest this becasue I had a problem where my tapes wouldn't show up even after an inventory.  After I did this and let the library find all it's tapes, it was happy.

[Jack_Dorsey]

Interesting...I can do that with one tape drive as it is in a rackmounted loader.

The other is in the server itself, mounted in a 5.25" drive bay.  I will shutdown the server completely and report back.

Thanks, Jack

[Jack_Dorsey]

Unfortunately that did not work. 

I tried an Inventory Job on one of the tape drives.  After the "initializing" message clears, the job instantly goes into a "queued" state and does not progress further, nor will it allow a cancellation task (sits at "cancellation pending").

Thanks for the idea though.  I thought that might have been it!

[Lance_Daschle]

Well the next thing I would try would be drivers, deleting the device from BE and re-adding, or repair install of BE it's self.  But that is me and I typically like to start from bottom up when diagnosing a problem.

[Jack_Dorsey]

I am trying the drivers now as a matter of fact.  I'll report back my findings in a moment.

Thanks!  Jack

[Jack_Dorsey]

A reinstall of the Sym drivers didn't work, either.  On to a repair install of BEX.  This is so weird!  Nothing has changed at all.

[Graham_Moseley]

I have exactly the same problem that started to occur on Monday so would be interested if you find a fix. I have also tried removing and reinstalling the tape device without success. i will also try a repair install

[RahulG]

Pause and unpaause the server  from the device tab

[Graham_Moseley]

I tried stopping and starting the services again but the device and media services are now stuck in stopping mode. I am going to reboot the server in a short while.

[RahulG · Accepted solution]

The above mentioned problem can occur if for some reason the Backup Exec database has the ServerStatus flag set to indicate that the server is "Paused" but the Backup Exec console is unable to display that status in the Backup Exec User Interface.
1.Click on the devices tab
2.right click on the server name
3.click pause
4.then click unpause

[RahulG]

also make sure you have the following hotfix installed http://support.veritas.com/docs/329045

[Jack_Dorsey]

RahulG, you're my hero.

Thanks much!  This was killing me.  I've marked your solution tip as "solved."

Best, Jack

[RahulG]

Thanks a lot !!!! Cheers