Microsoft DPM Fails with event ID: 7034" The DPM service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this x time(s)

Microsoft DPM Fails with event ID: 7034" The DPM service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this x time(s)

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Gregg Robertson

A few days ago while running restores on our Data Protection Manager(DPM) server the MMC failed and brought up the below error message

I checked all the services and the DPM and DPMRA services had stopped so i restarted them and made sure all the others were running also and then tried to reopen the DPM 2007 Administrator Console and after five to ten seconds it would fail and give me the same error above.

So I decided to start searching the Microsoft forums and the internet for any mention of this error and hopefully a solution. I found a number of postings with varying solutions and tried quite a few of them, from reinstalling DPM 2007 SP1, installing hotfixes and scouring the DPM error logs for any kind of answers but none of the worked/helped. So after having tried a sufficient amount of time to fix it myself i logged a ticket with Microsoft support as fortunately EMC is a gold partner. After finally getting hold of the support engineer (he asked me to call him for my support ticket…) he asked me to send him my log files which were located in a different place than what was mentioned in any of the forums I saw as mine were under C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM and the log in particular that the engineer said I would find the error and where he found it was the MSDPMCurr.errlog file. In here after Caught unhandled exception  ,right at the end of the line is the error message that shows what your problem is “There is an error in XML document (1, 1). —> System.Xml.XmlException: Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1”  The engineer said if I put this into a search engine and looked for it it would have told me my problem although I’ve tested this and can’t seem to see any solution that would have saved me calling them.

The solution in the end was a SQL query he made me run and was actually mentioned as something someone did mention in a forum but unfortunately didn’t post the SQL query. Here are the steps we took, These are at your own precaution:

• First we backed up the DPM Database by running “dpmbackup –db” and making sure it created it successfully under  C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\Database Backups.
• We then opened SQL Management Studio (I right clicked on the application and ran it as administrator due to my DPM being installed on Server 2008) and logged into the DPM database (if yours doesn’t show up by default as an option like mine didn’t, unless it was manually renamed it will be servername\”name after MSSQL in the error message” so mine as shown in the screenshot above was ms$dpm2007$)
• Once we were into SQL Management Studio we right clicked on the DPM server and selected “New Query” *NB* Change the database in the selection box from master to the DPM DB and then we pasted the following query into the window and ran it.

UPDATE tbl_TE_TaskTrail
SET ExecutionState = 3,
LastStateName = ‘Failure’,
StoppedDateTime = GetUtcDate()
WHERE ExecutionState NOT IN (2,3)

UPDATE tbl_JM_JobTrail
SET JobState= ‘Failed’,
EndDateTime = GetUtcDate()
WHERE jobstate= ‘Execute’ OR jobstate= ‘Retire

• At the bottom of the window it will tell you if the query executed successfully which mine did and then we opened the DPM Administrator Console and it wasn’t crashing anymore .