jfreund Posted September 5, 2004 Report Share Posted September 5, 2004 I am at wit's end! Retropect Backup Workgroup 5.1 ( Retrospect 5.15) Exabyte Exb-8900 Mammoth Tape Drive SCSI SCSI Controller Adaptec AHA-2940UW Driver - Microsoft 5.0.2195.6717 (6/17/03) mammoth.sys --- The Problem I had been using this system as our backup server for almost two years without a problem. On day, my tape backups started to fail. No error was posted, the backup would simply ask for another tape, it would wind through it without copying a file, then ask for another tape. Performing an Immediate Backup with an erased tape it will sit with 1 file completed on its status dialog box until it reacjes the end of the tape which takes a long time. --- Nothing wrong with Drive I long ago determined that there was nothing wrong with the tape drive (long story). At this time, if I restore the Removable Storage service I can use Ms Wibdow's Backup to write tapes. --- Reinstall of Windows Fixed problem for a short time I recently did a clean install of Windows 2000 Pro. After re-installing Retrospect the tape drive worked!! Of course I was installing other software including the Windows Updates. When I nexted ran the backup, it was back to its old tricks. --- everything else works In every other way retrospect seems to work. It erases tapes. It can read and restore from my past tapes. ---Suspected Problem I suspect the driver. Its dated 6/2003. This problem first surfaced in 10/2003 (yes I have been working on this a while. Retrospect does not seem to install its own driver, but it does disable the Removable Storage service. --- Help Is there anyone who can give me a clue? Thanks for your Help John Freund Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted September 6, 2004 Report Share Posted September 6, 2004 Hi Disable the windows tape driver in device manager. Otherwise they will conflict. Retrospect automatically disables the removeable storage manager for the same reasons. Has the Windows driver always been enabled? Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jfreund Posted September 6, 2004 Author Report Share Posted September 6, 2004 I never had to disable the driver in the past and as far as I know retrospect does not install another driver for this (Exabyte Mammoth) tape drive. I do suspect the driver. As I mentioned in my original post the driver is dated 6/2003. Perhaps this is a driver that was downloaded in an windows update and has compatibility problems. I tried running with the Tape Driver disabled. I was surprised that retrospect saw the drive. As in the recent past, it seems to perform all functions except being able to write to the tape. Thanks for the suggestion! John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted September 7, 2004 Report Share Posted September 7, 2004 Hi Retrospect supplies its own drivers for all tape drives. Dantz hasn't made any changes to Retrospect 5.1 or its drivers for a long time. It is unlikely that something just broke in Retrospect. Double check any changes you have made to the system. As a test you might want to re-enable the windows driver and try to backup using NTbackup. That will tell us if there is a problem with the drive or not. Thanks nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jfreund Posted September 8, 2004 Author Report Share Posted September 8, 2004 The drive is working. With the Removable Storage service restarted I have been able to run full backups using NTBackup. I just performed a clean install of Windows 2000 Pro on this machine. After that and re-installing Retrospect the drive worked. But shortly thereafter it started the same behavior as before. Thinking I had fixed the problem I did not keep track of my other re-installations. Again, I suspect the Windows updates from Microsoft. I suppose my next experiment will be to re-install the old mammoth.sys driver ( assuming there is on the CD) to the pre 6/2003 version to see if the drive starts working again. Thanks for continuing to try to help Nate. John Freund Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted September 8, 2004 Report Share Posted September 8, 2004 Hi You can also try installing ASPI with the ASPIINST.exe utility in the Retrospect folder. That will change the way Retrospect looks down the SCSI bus at your device. Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jfreund Posted September 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted September 12, 2004 Looks like the problem has finally been solved. Nate thanks for the hint that brought me to the solution! As you recommended I looked in the retrospect folder. I did not run aspiinst.exe which would have installed the old 4.60 version of aspi32.sys. I did run aspichk.exe which told me I had aspi32.sys version 4.71.1 installed. It also indicated that I had an older version of the software installed. Noticing that this was an adaptec utility I went to their web site to check for the latest version. It was there that I learned that a newer version 4.71.2 was available. Once I downloaded this and run the new aspiinst.exe it installed version 4.71.2, this was confirmed by the new aspichk.exe. Once I rebooted Retrospect worked as before and could write to my mammoth tape drive. Thanks again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.