Restore data when “Access Denied to Tape Media” error occurs

Occurrence of error messages is quite common. One such error message appears when you start Windows 2000 Backup program:

Access Denied to Tape Media

The current user account does not have rights to access the media managed by Removable Storage. As a result, no tape devices are available to this account.

If desired, an administrator can grant access to this account by running Backup to create media pools for this application, then granting this account rights to access each pool.

[ ] Do Not show this message again. OK

This message occurs even if you have logged in as administrator. Moreover, when you try to prepare a piece of media, you receive the confirmation that the free media label has been written for the media; however the work queue item is not posted and the media never gets prepared. This problem might arise when the internal Removable Storage Manager (RSM) database is corrupt and the corruption limits the media pools from being created and assessed. If you wish to modify the registry, then make sure that you have a backup copy; as serious problems might occur, if you alter registry incorrectly.

RSM database is located in %SystemRoot%\System32\Ntmsdata folder. Therefore when you create backup of %SystemRoot% folder using Windows 2000 Backup, it automatically creates the backup of RSM at two different location; one at the backup media itself and other at %SystemRoot%\System32\Ntmsdata\Export folder. We can use Windows 2000 Backup to restore data in the Ntmsdata folder, but the option does not work when RSM database is corrupt. Use one of the methods given below to manually initialize or restore data in the healthy RSM database:

If you never took a backup of %SystemRoot% then, there will be no folder named %SystemRoot%\System32\Ntmsdata\Export folder. So, force the RSM to create a new database:

1. Start the Computer Management tool, select Services and Applications and then select Services.

2. Locate and stop the Removable Storage Service (or change the startup type from Automatic to Disabled). Now restart the system

3. Start Windows Explorer, open %SystemRoot%\System32\Ntmsdata folder and rename the files in the folder as .old file extension or copy the files to another folder.

4. Now restart the Removable Storage service (or change the startup type from Disabled to Automatic) and again restart the system.

Now as the RSM restarts, it will create a new database. If you backed up the %SystemRoot% folder using Ntbackup tool before it got corrupt, then force RSM to import the backup RSM database. This way when RSM starts, it will read the preceding registry key and force the RSM database to be restored from the files located in %SystemRoot%\System32\Ntmsdata\Export folder.

Database corruption can lead you to innumerable issues. To get rid of all these issues, we suggest you utilize an effective third party restore data tool so that none of your data is lost due to malicious virus, dirty shutdowns or corruption issues.