The drive hardware is offline

[Lou0686]

Hi all,

Has anyone seen this problem?

BE 9.1 for Windows

I have replaced the drive and installed the Veritas drivers.
Test backup is successful.

I'm stumped. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Lou

 

[SQLBill]

On the My Computer icon in Windows,
right click, select Manage, click Device Manager. Do you see your tape device there?

If not, you'll need to run Add/Remove Hardware.

If it is there, try stopping and restarting Backup Exec services (all of them).

If none of that works....is the tape device a part of the server or is it a library? Part of the server, just reboot the server. A library, reboot the library, then reboot the server.

-SQLBill

 

[Lou0686]

SQLBill,

Thanks for the quick response.

Veritas sees the drive and I have already done everything you mentioned several times.

The drive is not offline within Veritas. If I do a test backup (3 GB or so) it's successful.

This only seems to happen duing the normal backup operation. To make matters worse, it doesn't happen every night. It seems to happen sporadically.

Lou

 

[lockstemz]

have you replaced the tape drive? if so try a different SCSI port ... if that doesnt work Run the Tape device diagnostics. if nothing changes ...ask Rohan.

 

[SQLBill]

Is there some maintenance job being done on the network or the server at the time that the job fails?

-SQLBill

 

[Lou0686]

Hi,

That's one of the things that I am trying to determine now. The job kicks off but no data is ever backed up. I have seen it fail after 1 hour and after 2 hours.

I just got off the phone with Veritas support. They had me download the latest drivers.
I'm also changing the start time from 11PM to 8PM.

Let us see what tonight's results are.

Thanks for your input
Lou

 

[matthewcapstick]

Hi Lou,

Did you solve this?

I am having exactly the same problem. I have a 2-drive LTO2 Library and several backups run before suddenly I get the same error as you and the backups start to fail for several jobs (on both drives). The strange thing is the drive obviously comes back on-line as some later backups run successfully (for both drives)

Any ideas?

Cheers

Matt

 

[Lou0686]

Hi Matt,

I,m sorry to say that it never did get solved. Since the problem was happening sporadically the client decided not to pursue it further. But I would be interested if someone does find the solution.

Lou

 

[pikk67]

I don't know what hardware you're running but...Here's my 2 cents anyway.

I run a Certance DAT72 6 tape Autoloader (w/9.1 BE) and was having a similar problem. What happened on my system appeared to be driver related. For some reason, the Medium Changer was listed as being installed correctly but the driver was faulty. Everytime I would swap out my tapes, the drive would go off-line. I resolved it by changing the drivers to "Unknown" which is what I beliwve Veritas installs. The drive was previously installed with the Windows 2000 drivers and these were quite out dated. Seems to be ok now.

Hope this sheds some light on the problem.

P'

 

[SQLBill]

I have the offline problem and have been working it for several weeks. If I find a solution I'll post it, but....

DELL had me set my Medium Changer to UNKNOWN. However, that still hasn't brought my drives back online. Veritas sees them as offline but the OS (right click on My Computer icon, select Manage, Device Manager) doesn't show a tape device connected at all.

I've had to load the latest MDAC and am currently working on 'upgrading' my Veritas install from 9.0 4367 to 4454. None of the patches to get to 4454 were needed for us, but now you can't update the drivers without updating the 9.0 version.

If you change the medium changer to unknown, remember to reboot your tape device, then reboot your server.

-SQLBill

 

[hammamet]

I'm running V9.0 4454 with Veritas drivers and using an AIT3 single tape drive and an AIT2 autoloader and am continually getting 2 problems: jobs failing with the tape hardware reported as going offline in the middle of a backup, although when you check it's there and you can start the job running again, and reports of the Job Engine stopping. Everything used to run okay and nothing has changed on the server to cause these problems - anyone found a solution, before I have a complete breakdown?