"Please remove the media from the drive" infinite loop

[chpicker]

One of my clients has Veritas (Symantec) Backup Exec 10d (Version 10.1 Rev. 5629) running on Server 2000 SBS. The daily backup job is configured to run Mon-Fri at 11pm. It takes about 6 hours to complete. When it's finished, it automatically ejects the tape and throws the alert "Please remove the media from the drive." Backup Exec is configured to automatically respond to the Media Remove event after 2 minutes. Normally, after the event is auto-cleared, the job finishes and the next one is automatically scheduled.

Not always, but occasionally, the Media Remove alert will reappear every time it gets cleared. This results in a log file full of Media Remove events...approximately every 4 minutes. This is what they find when they come into the office in the morning.

Here is the odd part. Sometimes if you go to the active alert and clear it by hand it will go away and the job will complete. The rest of the time it will just keep coming back no matter what and all we can do is cancel the job to get it to stop.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this? It is starting to happen more frequently lately. It's still not every time, but it's getting worse.

Ian

 

[LawnBoy]

Are you running out of tape before the job completes?

 

[chpicker]

No, the job is getting completed. It writes the data and verifies it. The backup is good. It just gets caught up in the tape eject process. It's stuck in a loop telling the user to remove the tape from the drive.

I realize we could all wish for this to be the most serious problem we're dealing with. )

Ian