Cannot restart SQL Backup service

Francois

Hello,

This weekend, four backup jobs failed (3 days in a row) on our production server. Each of them produced the following error message:

“SQL Backup job failed with exitcode: 5160 SQL error code: 0 [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 50000). The step failed.”

This error codes refers to “Error acquiring mutex: <value>” in the product documentation. When I manually tried to start these jobs, 2 of them worked, and two of them failed with that same error message. After starting again the job that failed twice, they finally worked.

In order to reduce the risk of this happening again this night, I tried restarting the “SQL Backup” service, but it won’t restart. Here’s the error I am getting in Event viewer when trying to restart the service:

“SQL Backup Agent startup error: error initialising IPC objects. Error creating mutex (already exists): Global\SQBMutex_”

SQL Backup version: 4.6.0.815 running on SQL Server 2005 SP2

Any pointers? Thanks for helping!

Francois.

Francois

Problem resolved by killing 58 (!) handles to the SQBMutex_ semaphore owned by SQL Server (sqlservr.exe) using Process Explorer software from SysInternals:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... lorer.mspx

Francois.