Question : Problem: Restore not doing anything at all

OK so we have Veritas Backupexec 9.1 running on Windows 2000 Server. It used to work fine....but not anymore. Backups still run ok (most the time) but when I came to restore something today the restore job found the media then started running....and just sat there saying running for 3 hours before I finally cancelled it. It had done 112 Bytes by the time I cancelled it. I was only trying to restore 3 small excel files but they are very important and we now only have this one set of tapes with them on (the backup was 170GB spread accross 2 tapes).
So basically my question is: are there any suggestions as to how I might be able to fix this? I checked the windows event logs and found no errors in there. Apparently a similar problem happened a long time ago with this same tape drive but we found that labelling the media within veritas seemed to stop it happening...this time the media is already labelled. If there isnt any way to fix this, is there at least a method I could use to just get these 3 excel files off the tape and then worry about the long term problem later?

Answer : Problem: Restore not doing anything at all

I eventually found that basically the first time we did a restore of any amount of data from any tape, it would take a few hours, but then if we tried restoring from the same tape again (any amount of data) it worked fine in the normal timeframe. The IT manager on site is happy to just live with this for now - as long as the data is actually recoverable, which it is, then hes not bothered if we have to do one slow restore first before restoring the actual data. Thanks for the suggestions though.