Question : Problem: DISASTER--SERVER CRASHED......CANNOT GET DATA OFF BACKUP TAPE..

I need SERIOUS HELP!!

I was running an NT 4.0 Server with ArcSERVE 6.61....the other day, our server crashed...2 of three hard drives went bad, the floppy went bad, and the tape drive went bad...

To bring the server back up, we purchased two new hard drives and installed Windows 2000....reinstalled all software....went to BackupExec 9.0.  

After a while, we realized that the tape drive was bad.  A guy I know has the exact server and gave me his tape drive.  We then put the tape drive on another server (an NT Terminal Server) and reloaded the ArcServeIT for NT.  When we did so, the backup tapes, which contain all of our info, could not be read.    When I attempted to restore the database, I got error messages that kept prompting me to mount media....it seems to think that the tape is blank....

I know for a fact that the two tapes had the files written to them b/c there were no errors in the log (I check the log every day)....

I am thinking that maybe we should try it on another NT server (not Terminal Server).....

Any ideas?  I have been trying to research things and another idea is tape retension???

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Answer : Problem: DISASTER--SERVER CRASHED......CANNOT GET DATA OFF BACKUP TAPE..

The first message comes from the drive, without a matching tape log it is not possible to tell what is really going on.
The second message is coming from the OS. NT SCSI port error can be real tough to track down sometimes. It might be tied in with the first error. Since the drive is back in the other server I won't bother to go into it further.

BackupExec advertises they it reads ARCserve tapes, so why not give it a try.