Corrupted Veritas BackupExec Database

This afternoon, our data center operator called me during my colleague’s presentation. He said he is encountering error while trying to change the tape media for the Dell PV136T Tape Library. I have no choice but to leave the session and help to troubleshoot the issue.

From the BackupExec administrator program, I noticed that BackupExec had lost communication with the tape library. I stopped all BackupExec services on all servers and asked the operator to restart the tape library. After the tape library started up, I restarted the master backup server and restarted all BackupExec services. The communication between the backup servers and the tape library was reinstated. However, when I tried to quick erase a tape media, the communication was broken as soon as the tape was loaded.

After checking the event log and Veritas support site, I saw the following TechNote.

"Unable to acquire device or media. Invalid Physical Volume Library Client Identifier" (a0008102 HEX or e0008102 HEX) is reported during a backup job

Solution 1 which tries to repair the BackupExec database does not work for me so I try solution 2.

I stopped all BackupExec services on all servers and asked the operator to shutdown the tape library. I tried to recover the database from the flat-file database backup file BEDB.bak by moving bedb_dat.mdf and bedb_log.ldf files to an alternate location. Then I asked the operator to power up the tape library and restarted the master backup server after the tape library and tape drives were online. I tried to quick erase a tape media and it was successful. I restarted all BackupExec services for the other servers and complete the inventory of the remaining tapes.

Pin It