Hi folks, We recently installed the Veritas Backup Exec software into our Windows 2003 server for our tape backup services. It failed to work and causing lots of troubles. We then uninstalled it and resume using the earlier Microsoft built in driver for the tape drive. Yet we still have problem. When we do backing up manually, the system will stop at midway and say that there is a hardware problem and the backup process terminated. We re-install the Microsoft tape drive driver(default) but no effect. Yesterday, I scheduled a backup at after office hours, the backup process was not even activated at the preset time. Could anyone kindly give some insight. Anybody once have a similar problem. Greatly appreciated for any input.

Did you check the compatibility of your tape drive with Windows? If not, get looking on their web site's knowledge base. It could be you have a drive that's not compatible, or doesn't interface easily. Also, you could try updating the tape drives firmware.

Thanks for the quick reply Curt R. But in my humble opinion, I think the compatibility should be OK. Because before we installed the Veritas software, we had used the regular Microsoft default driver(tape drive is Sony SDT-11000)and it worked fine. After we installed Veritas, everything was not right; not only backup failed, sometimes even the tape ejected by itself after insertion(???). After uninstalling Veritas, the automatic tape ejection symtom stopped, but the backup failure still occurred. Can anyone give some idea. Sorry if my former statement was not clear enough.

Well if it was running properly in 2003 and didn't start screwing up until you installed Veritas, you've found your problem. Why not use the native ntbackup? I know it's a little bulky to set up but once you've created your backup set, it will work fine. I've created quite a few backups for people using ntbackup and have it down to an art form. I'm happy to say, they're all running fine provding everyone remembers to log off at the end of the day (without an open file agent, I've seen ntbackup stop working if it hit's too many open files). If you want, I can provide you a link for creating backups in ntbackup on microsoft's web site. NOTE: I've found 2003's ntbackup sometimes doesn't report if you have it set to "summary". "Detail" seems to work properly all the time though.

Hi there. We recently installed a new backup server at our site. I use ArcServe 11 and have had weird problems with backups as well. After various phonecalls to HP (tape drive manufacturer) we found that there is a general problem when using any other backup software with MS Server 2003. Basically Windows will try and control the backup device as well as the 3rd party backup software manufacturer. You need to disable the REMOVABLE STORAGE service. When I was first told this I thought this would stop the tape device from being recognised but it doesn't. Would be interested to know if this works for you! Oh and apparently it's a known MS problem....cheers

Hi folks, Sorry folks, perhaps I did not discribe my situation clearly. Here is what happened: I started the backup process by using the Windows 2003 server built in backup utilities( after I uninstalled Vertias), the process went on fine and backup did start and progressed. But at midway(after 15 min/30 min depending on the size of the backup) a message came out as: Error: The device reported an error on a request to write data to media. Error reported: Hardware failure. There may be a hardware or media problem. The operation was ended. We changed different tapes but still failed. Later we had two occasion successful backup and later failed again. My question is that what hardware problem we are having. If it's the tape drive, why we succeed occasionally? Thanks. I hope I didn't confuse you all.

Greetings, He have experienced similar problem using ntbackup with IBM LTO2 tape drives on Windows 2003. However, we didn't have any successful backups up to now. Standard backup software for us is Legato Networker, however running backup using this software we could not get more than 60GB on each tape (standard capacity is 200 GB). It always failed with I/O error. IBM technical support told us that there is general problem with Windows 2003 storport driver, however, updating it didn't resolve the problem either. It seems that Windows 2003 still has quite a lot of 'undocumented features' or bugs that are not resolved yet. Cheers Normunds