HP Data Protector Express Single Server 4.00-sp1 restore issue

We were using HP Data Protector Express Single Server 4.00-sp1 for quite some time. More that 4 year and everything was working perfectly! Backup, restore, backup, restore, perfectly! DPX was running on Windows2003 Server and have HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 tape device. We have to give away that specific tape device. In my earlier post, I wrote about issue with tape devices and how I handle that.

Reason why we need HP tape drive and not ape device from some other vendor like IBM(and we do have IBM System Storage Ultrium LTO3 tape drive) is because DPX Single Server only support HP tape drive devices.

Here is compatibility matrix for DPX 4.00-sp1.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/datapexp/pdf/DPXMatrix_0310.pdf

So we were stuck with HP tape drives if we wanted to continue using DPX Single Server or we could buy licence for DPX but this was not an option.

Ok, so I attached resurrected HP StorageWorks Ultrium 960 tape drive to server and start restoring data from LTO3 tapes. I had to restore 6 tapes. I managed to restored data from first two tapes. When I start to restore data from third tape and then problems start to show.
Errors were

Error 1040:No devices specified or all devices are now offline
Error 4408: Object end not found 

It is very important to say that this error appears after 18 hours of DPX working on tape and that is REALLY frustrating!!! If you want to cancel process you have to reboot server because job that you want to cancel is in waiting for termination state and that last for hours!

 

First I suspected on tape devices but I tested them using HP Library and Tape Tools(LTT) and all test (drive test and tape test) passed. I then suspected on SCSI cable so I replace him but still same issue appeared. After all this excluded only thing that is left is Data Protector.  I was to afraid to do anything with DPX because of licence issues and what will happened if I upgrade it to newer version.

So I downloaded DPX 5.00 version just to try it. I installed it on RH EL 6.3. HP tape drives were recognised  instantly. I imported tape to DPX 5.0. This process lasted for 23 hours. When I start to restore data to file system errors start to appeared! But this time it was different.

Error 3005: Invalid stream

Error 3010: Incompatible format

I found on some forum that if have error 3010 using tape device it could only be that when you were doing backup option native data stream format was checked. This option is checked by default in DPX 4.00-sp1. This means that data can be only restored to same file system and as I try to restore data on EXT3 instead on NTFS.

I install Win2003, install DPX 5.00 and now I am restoring data with no problem.

I still don't know what caused this problem but I suspect on DPX 4.00 database.

I hope that this can help someone and lots of time!