Ecrix VXA-1 Drive refusing to restore with NTBackup

[DanielUK]

Well I had the fright of my life tonight when a botched CISCO Router install fiddled around with my server network settings causing the network to disappear. I've since sorted that but this bought an alarming restore problem to yhe fore and I'm not sure if it's me, the VXA tape drive or NTBackup.

Because I couldn't resolve the network problem after a couple of hours I thought I'd restore the system state from the last backup prior to the router install (done a few hours ago). Although it lists the correct media/date/time and would appear to load when selecting the files to restore, it ends up with "Please check the Removable Storage Management (MMC)". Also, the funny thing is when it's loading the media, although I've clicked the correct date it always specifies the "requested media" as being a day to a few days BEFORE the actual date of the restore listed on the tape. What does this signify as it doesn't sound correct? I've tried a restore off two tapes now and I doubt whether it's the tapes themselves. Any ideas on how to tackle this problem?

Thanks

Dan

 

[DanielUK]

I've just come in this morning and am looking at the backup tapes. I thought I'd try and experiment with backing up a small selection of files and restoring them. Going back to this date anomaly (see above), if I put the tape labelled "Media created 27/04/2004 at 5:22pm" in the tape drive after choosing it in the "Backup media or file named" drop down box and then choose to append then click the "start backup" button it says:

"The requested media is not online. Please insert the specified media:

Media created 4/20/2004 at 5:40pm , media #1"

What's with the different dates i.e. why is it asking for a tape done 7 days before the tape I've specified?

Thanks

Dan

 

[DanielUK]

OK, sorted it, I'm guessing somehow the catalog got corrupt. This is how I rectified it based on a few deja postings:

1. Removed tape from the drive
2. I had a heap of catalogue listings under Restore. I went through each one and deleted.
3. I stopped the Removable Storage service in Admin Tools | Services
4. I went to the c:\winnt\system32\ntmsda folder and renamed the following two files to something else: ntsmdata and ntsmdata.bak. This gets rid of any previous information about previously used tapes.
5. I re-started the Removable Storage service.
6. I started up the backup program and inserted the tape. The tape was detected so I right clicked and selected "Catalog". It took about 2 minutes to process but it has allowed me to do a dummy restore fine this time. There's also no anomaly with the dates.

Dan