semaphore timeout

This most likely means your hard drive is about to fail or has corruption.


"Margie" <spy_234432@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:8a535156.0307291239.5d859857@posting.google.c om...[color=blue]
> Hi, has anyone gotten the error "semaphore timeout" when trying to do
> a backup to disk? The disk is a logical partition. There are two
> drives, c: and d:. Backing up to c: is fine. However, backing up to
> d: produces the error below. Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> Here is the command : backup database model to TestM2
>[/color]

I've done more troubleshooting and have determined that "backup log"
works, whereas "backup database" does not. How weird!

Also, I ran chkdsk, but it does not show anything. It's an NTFS, so I
think it might be better to run upon reboot. But here are the
results.

Thanks again for any suggestions/help!

The type of the file system is NTFS.

WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3
Security descriptor verification completed.

14675345 KB total disk space.
8677676 KB in 191 files.
60 KB in 57 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
68129 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
5929480 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
3668836 total allocation units on disk.
1482370 allocation units available on disk.

Anytime I've seen this error it was due to a problem with hardware in the disk subsystem. Maybe a
SCSI cable is bad, or your RAID card is getting flaky. These things might not show up in a
CHKDSK; you might need to use some of the utilities that come with your RAID card to evaluate the
disks' health.


"Margie" <spy_234432@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:8a535156.0307300757.7be80a56@posting.google.c om...[color=blue]
> I've done more troubleshooting and have determined that "backup log"
> works, whereas "backup database" does not. How weird!
>
> Also, I ran chkdsk, but it does not show anything. It's an NTFS, so I
> think it might be better to run upon reboot. But here are the
> results.
>
> Thanks again for any suggestions/help!
>
> The type of the file system is NTFS.
>
> WARNING! F parameter not specified.
> Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
>
> CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
> File verification completed.
> CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
> Index verification completed.
> CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3
> Security descriptor verification completed.
>
> 14675345 KB total disk space.
> 8677676 KB in 191 files.
> 60 KB in 57 indexes.
> 0 KB in bad sectors.
> 68129 KB in use by the system.
> 65536 KB occupied by the log file.
> 5929480 KB available on disk.
>
> 4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
> 3668836 total allocation units on disk.
> 1482370 allocation units available on disk.[/color]

D Newton,
Thanks for your help. It did turn out to be a bad disk problem. When
we ran chkdsk /r, it discovered some bad sectors. We ran chkdsk to
fix them. After that, we de-fragged the disk. The backup worked fine
after that.
Thanks, Margie