DLT8000 Drives showing as "writing, idle"

[SPGuk]

I'm running a Scalar 100 autoloader with 6 DLT8000 drives on a Win2k server and over the last few months we've been getting a "writing, idle" message on random drives each night.

It started off quite sporadically in the beginning but now it happens all the time - sometimes two drives, sometimes all six. There are always hung client sessions as well (which display as <clientname>:E:\ saving for example), although the actual savegroups are showing up as being completed successfully. The hung clients are never the same combination. Also it doesn't appear that these lock the drives for backups, it just prevents the unmounting of tapes in the morning.

The only way I can temporarily resolve this each day is to kill the nsrmmd's, but I'd be happier if I knew why this was happening in the first place.

Any ideas?

 

[SPGuk]

Forgot to say that I'm running W2k SP2 and Networker Admin 6.1.2 if it's important.

 

[LGTObug]

did you shut down the REMOVABLE STORAGE MANAGER on windows?
This could cause some troubles. Maybe it helps

 

[SPGuk]

Hi LGTObug. Thx for the advice, however I have just checked and can see that the Removable Storage Manager service is up and running fine. This is set to automatic startup on our systems so there would have been no need for us to turn it off (until now... cue evil laugh ;-).

I'll try stopping and restarting this service (along with the nwadmin ones) and see if this makes a difference with our backups tonight. I'll post an update tomorrow morning.

Cheers

Si

 

[SPGuk]

Well good news it seems! Came in this morning to find the tape drives back to normal and no more writing idle messages. Sweet.

I'll keep a close eye on this for now and see what happens over the next few days. Thx once again for your advice LGTObug.