windows 2000 backup fails… why?

Hello,
We’ve been running Backup on a w2kserver running SQL7 without a hitch for a while… it’s a Monday through Friday schedule doing a complete backup of crucial drives plus system state… normal backup, overwriting data and verifying. Lately, the verifies started blowing out, and even after turning that off, the backups continue to fail every night due to:

Error: The device reported an error on a request to write data to media.

and

Error: Timeout before function completed.

Like I said, the backups were running smooth, now this… any ideas? Thanks!!!

cb.