Retrospect Unable to Add Client or Scan (Solved)

[wwwolf]

Hi Everyone,

 

I'm just putting this down in case it will help anyone in the future.  I was able to track down and solve an issue with the Retrospect Windows client that stumped support.

 

I'm running a Retrospect Windows 10.5.0.110 and was trying to backup a Windows server with a matching client.

 

It had been working for a year, but all of a sudden the client was refusing to backup.  I think it was stalling on either the 'Starting' step or the 'Scanning' step.  No error message, it would just hang there forever.  I had to basically reboot booth the server and client to get them talking again.

 

I tried uninstalling the client and installing it again.  The software would install fine, but when I connected to it from the Retrospect server it would hang forever after entering the client's password.  And even if I restarted everything it would hang if I went to the 'Volumes' tab.

 

Long story short, the problem had nothing to do with the Retrospect client itself, but with the CD-ROM of all things.  I had a disk that had been sitting in the client system untouched for a year, collecting dust.  Eventually Windows was unable to read it and would stall out.  Windows had a timer that would cause it to give up reading the disk after a couple of minutes, but Retrospect would not.  It just continued to try and read the CD-ROM over and over and over again.  Removing the CD-ROM solved the problem.

 

If you ever get stuck like this I recommend checking all of your system volumes to make sure they're accessible, Retrospect might be stalling on one.