Windows 2000 crash

[Ira]

I just installed Express 5.6.132. It came with the Maxtor 1-button external drive. That automatic one-button backup appeared to work ok, and the drive appears to work fine. But in trying to use Retrospect itself to do a backup, I find it crashes my Windows 2000 computer. It starts a "scan" of the volume I have told it I want to backup, seems to pause part way through that process, and after hanging a bit, the entire computer crashes and Windows reboots.

 

 

 

In two years of using Windows 2000, this is the first time any program has been able to crash my entire system. Impressive in a way. But how do I stop this problem? Thanks for any help.

[AmyJ]

The system crashes when scanning the source volume (Win2K)? If so, please use a disk utility (such as Norton Utilities, McAfee, etc.) to check the volume for problems.

 

 

 

Also, make sure no third-party applications are running during the backup/scan operation.

[Ira]

Thanks for the reply. I do not believe there's any difficulty with the volume. I've checked all of them with the computer management facility in Win2K and all are labelled "healthy". These are NTFS volumes. The problem has happened twice, and not with the same volume each time (once with the system volume, and once with a volume containing only data). This does not happen every time.

 

 

 

What third party applications do you have in mind? Are there some with known conflicts, or are their kinds of apps which might be suspect? Obviously in any Win 2K environment there will be always be several apps or processes active at any time. Some could be turned off (e.g., Microsoft Outlook) although it would be inconvenient. Some cannot be (e.g., network services). I might also mention that the manual says explicitly that you can use other programs while retrospect runs in the background. A generic reply to "have nothing else running" really is not so helpful; a suggestion that particular programs might cause a conflict could be.

 

 

 

Thanks for your help.

[AmyJ]

Yes, Retrospect can absolutely run while other programs are running. Also, the program is fully compatible in a Win2K environment. However, in your configuration, the system is crashing when Retrospect is scanning the volume. The key is to figure out where the conflict lies in your environment. There is no definitive list of programs which conflict with Retrospect. In other words, there is no single program that I can say will always cause a problem.

 

 

 

For testing, you should disable things like virus software, or anything other third-party utility that is constantly monitoring the system. You should check the drive with a utility to look for problems in the system. Disk management checks the health of the disk itself - it does not check for problems in the OS.

 

 

 

Does the problem happen only during a scan of the volume or is it happening during some other part of the operation - such as copying?

 

 

 

Are these all local volumes? Any network shared volumes involved?

 

 

 

As a test, try unhooking the Maxtor drive and doing a backup directly to your local drive - do you see the same issues?