RESOLVED: VSS error causing backup to fail, system becomes unbootable

Did you follow the web links given by VSS Doctor for the errors recorded in the system logs as these may have further help on resolving the issues found?

I would also recommend doing a CHKDSK /F for each of your partitions in case there are drive errors at work here.

See KB 59440: Acronis True Image 2017: 'Snapshot for backup' option overview for details of how to use the different snapshot methods available to eliminate VSS as an issue when backup tasks are run.

Jerry,

Does you RAID 1 array still appear as a single disk when viewed in Windows Disk Management?  Can you post ATI VSS logs found at C:\ProgramData\Acronis\VssRequestorLogs here in the thread?  They may provide further details.

By all means follow Steve's suggestion to check out the Google links shown in VSS Doctor tool, they can provide answers.

Steve Smith:

The only links VSS Doctor shows are to search Google, which I have done. Most of what Google finds is very old, and I'm not going to trust a solution offered in 2011.

The link offered in the event log is a dead end.

I checked out (and printed) the Acronis page about snapshot alternatives. I'm definitely going to try those. It they fail, I will boot from a recovery disk and do a backup that way.

Enchantech:

Windows, the Intel RAID management software, and chipset interface say the array is healthy.

I'm pretty well convinced this is not an Acronis problem. I tried to make a Windows restore point, and it spat out the equivalent error message.

At this point, I'm beginning to suspect a hardware problem.Once I have a backup I can trust, I'm going to pull one of the disk drives and see what happens. If it still fails, I'll pull the other one and try again.

I'm going to wind up doing a full restore, I suspect; but I also suspect that, in and of itself, won't fix the problem.

What bothers me is that the system needs to go to a restore point repair just to boot. Why would a hardware problem cause damage requiring what I believe is a software fix?

I think your boot problem is related to your machine bios boot order. 

What version of Windows are you running?

Is this a UEFI boot or and MBR boot computer?

How old is your computer?

Have you ever changed the CMOS battery in the machine?

I would suggest booting to the bios and looking at the date and time set there first thing.  If it is not current I would replace the CMOS battery.  Even if it is current and is over 6 or so years old I would replace it.

While in the bios check your boot priority order.  If UEFI boot this needs to be Windows Boot Manager, if MBR boot this should be the Windows disk.

It would be interesting to know if a VSS Writer failed or if VSS is simply dependent on whatever the failure is!  A look at the VSS Requestor log should reveal this.

The system is about a year old. The drives are formatted MBR, with automatic detection. The mobo is an Asus X99-E.

There is a BIOS update available, but there's no way I'm going to tinker with that now. The system has been running fine for a year—except that I had to replace one of the two disks in the array. That went smoothly, and it's run fine for the two months since.

I changed the boot order a week or so ago, but that was after this problem started. I booted from the ATI rescue disk to back up my critical documents. I've since changed it back.

I don't know where the VSS requestor log is.

I do see that I'm getting piles of

svchost (17900,G,0) The beta feature EseDiskFlushConsistency is enabled in ESENT due to the beta site mode settings 0x800000.

information level messages. I have no idea if that's related. From what I've read, it's harmless.

I tried to do an online disk check, and it couldn't run. I found a chkdsk information message logged:

Chkdsk was executed in scan mode on a volume snapshot. Checking file system on C: The shadow copy provider had an error. Check the System and Application event logs for more information. A snapshot error occured while scanning this drive. You can try again, but if this problem persists, run an offline scan and fix.

VolSnap error logged.

The shadow copy of volume C: being created failed to install.

Jerry, you can use the MVP Log Viewer tool (download from the Community Tools link) to find and view the VSS Requestor logs:

I would recommend doing an offline CHKDSK on your source drive which you should be able to do if you can boot into a Windows Recover Command prompt, or else boot Windows from a DVD (Install or Repair media).  Otherwise go to your drive manufacturers support site and download any diagnostic tools available for checking the full drive outside of Windows.

I'm running a full disk backup right now using the old Acronis snapshot method.

I've been looking at the VSS requestor logs. Granted that I don't know what I'm looking at, I don't see anything that looks like an error.

I will certainly do an offline chkdsk when I get there. I have to go through several failed boots and failed automatic repairs before I get to the manual repair options.

For my 2 cents worth I have had problems with ASUS bios versions on two Z97 boards, not the same as the X99 but close, and was not fully able to overcome the issue until the last update revision.  All of these problems were boot related.  I would set the bios for specific boot parameter, save and exit, and experience boot failure.  Power cycle off, start machine and enter bios and find that my boot selection did not stick.  Re-select the desired option and sometimes it would take and other times it would not.  You know what they say about 3, third times a charm, well that was certainly the case with these Z97 ASUS boards.

The last revision of bios firmware seems to have corrected the issue in large part.  I only experience failure on occasion now rather than all the time!

Another tip is to disconnect the data cables from the RAID array, both sides and re-seat them.  It often fixes errant issue like these.

Okay, this is definitely not an Acronis problem. I decided to create a new recovery drive on a flash drive, and the same VSS error (12289) was logged. The system was unable to create the recovery drive. I had not done any Acronis backups since booting the machine.

Curiously, Edge (which shows up as ESENT in the application log) threw an error immediately afterwards.

svchost (3916,T,0) SRUJet: A request to write to the file "C:\WINDOWS\system32\SRU\SRUDB.dat" at offset 0 (0x0000000000000000) for 4096 (0x00001000) bytes succeeded, but took an abnormally long time (16 seconds) to be serviced by the OS. This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.

Interesting, eh? Time to unplug one of my disk drives and see what happens.

Yeah! Indeed, check the data cables as well.  Hopefully you have a spare one to do that with.

This has been a total nightmare!

• I tested first one then the other of my drives. They both generated the same 12289 VSS error, leading to corrupted backups (they failed validation).
• I through caution to the winds and decided to shotgun the problem. I updated the BIOS, and I let Windows install it's latest update. The 12289 errors went away, but I still had the other problem: after a successful backup, the system wouldn't boot. I had to use a restore point to get it back up.
• I did an offline disk backup. As you'd expect, that did no harm.
• I tried recovering the whole drive and partitions from the full online backup I'd just made. The recovery worked just fine, but the resulting system wouldn't boot. There were no restore points available; I guess they don't get backed up.
• I used the offline backup to get the system back on the air.
• I tried many more combinations and repeated my work. Under no circumstances could I do an online full backup without clobbering the ability of the system to boot.
• Offline backups, and recovery from offline backups, did work if the offline backup had been made from a working system. If the system were already damaged, offline backups and recoveries faithfully recreated an unbootable system.
• I finally did what I should have done first: I uninstalled, downloaded the latest build, and did a clean install of ATI. After that, I could do a backup without damaging my system.
• Unfortunately, I'd made so many copies of my system that I'd had to free up space on my external drives. I'd accidentally deleted my very first offline backup, which had the latest versions of all my files. I had a working system, but some of my documents had regressed.
• Oh, well, says I, I still have my cloud backup. I tried to do a restore, and it was inaccessible. Acronis was having a problem at their end. It took them a day or two to fix that. When they finally did, for one reason or another my cloud back was damaged. I couldn't get a recovery to work.
• When I downloaded the whole thing as a zip file, WinZip prompted me for the second file. The cloud download had only given me one file, so that was a problem.
• I tried to do a file recovery from my most recent incremental backup. That failed, because the backup chain was damaged in some way. It failed validation.
• I discovered, fortunately, that although my most recent incremental backup was unusable to ATI, I could mount it. I was able to recover the latest versions of my files from that.

I'm still hunting for the latest versions of some files, and trying to figure out how to get my backups working again, but at least I'm not completely dead.

Jerry, thank you for the update on your progress (or lack of) - this has been a very strange problem for all of us, I have never encountered a problem where just doing an online backup can cause the system to become unbootable.  Sorry to hear of the further issues with recovering your documents and with the Cloud. 

I can see daylight now. I think I've pieced together all of my documents. That leaves some application updates, which will take care of themselves in time, and a couple of applications that I installed after my latest recovery. I have successfully retrieved files from my cloud backup, which I couldn't do before, and done a subsequent cloud backup that succeeded.

I do have another problem, which I certainly hope is unrelated. From time to time my disk array goes about 100% busy. The system becomes unusable (the mouse lags by many seconds), and the disk access LED is on steady...not a flicker. I've seen similar problems when a drive was failing (thank heavens for mirroring), but the symptoms were slightly different.

The best clue I have is that when this happens, Firefox dies with an error message. Some operating systems will prioritize disk I/O so that no user application can hog a resource, but I don't know if or how effectively Windows does that. In any case, I uninstalled Firefox and switched to another browser.

I think I forgot to mention this, but in the midst of all this the forum server went nuts and I couldn't log in. That took a day or so for Acronis to fix.

We shall see.

Jerry, glad that the progress looks to be continuing.  The disk array issue does sound a little worrying so hope you get to the root of that before anything else comes along to bite you!

The forum issues impacted everyone, including the MVP's where unless you were already logged in (and kept the associated cookie in your browser) then it wasn't possible to log in again.  A couple of us were able to report this and Acronis has resolved that immediate issue, but the reason why this happened was due to a hack attack on the forum where Acronis were trying to bring in changes to prevent further attacks!  You will see some other changes due to this too, i.e. hyperlinks can no longer have options to open in a new window etc.

I'm still missing at least two files, which of course makes me wonder what else might be gone. What's strange is that the folder created at the same time is there; it's just empty.

At this point, my head is twisted around, so I might be seeing things.

Two things...

First, there is a known problem with the Asus X99 motherboards related to USB usage and booting. Just Google "Asus X99 Problems" to see if you can get some insight into your issue.

Second, If you go to the System Protection settings, see how much space is allocated to protection. Before reducing it, my system was set to unlimited. That seems to imply that it could suck up your entire drive for VSS, Restore Points, etc. In my case, I limit it to 15% of my drive and even then it's probably far more than I need.

Hope at least one of these noted issues can help.

I don't remember if I've ever booted from a USB device. I probably did to test the recovery flash drive. During this science project, I've been booting exclusively from internal devices. They laughed when I had them put in an ATA Blu-ray drive, but I've been around a long time.

My system protection has no space limit set, but I don't expect that to be a problem. I have a lot of empty space.

I'm still having problems recovering files. I have several orphan backups on the cloud, but most seem to be damaged. I can pick off files, but if I try to do a full restore ATI gags. I also downloaded an entire backup, but the resulting zip file seemed to be incomplete. I have an open ticket on that issue, but it takes a very long time to download a cloud backup.

It seems like things are returning to normal. Because my online backups got screwed up, it's possible that I'm missing email messages; but I imported as many as I could from as many backups as I could.

I haven't reinstalled Firefox yet. I'm watching to see if the disk problem reappears without it.

I have done full backups and rebooted many times, and that seems to be okay.

Thanks for the update Jerry, hope things continue to be normal for you.

Just when I thought I was out of the woods, some of my drivers disappeared. The one I noticed was the USB controller driver, because when I rebooted my system I had no mouse or keyboard. I used the offline ATI to restore the entire Windows directory from an old backup, and (with the help of a PS2 keyboard) pulled the drivers out of that. It's amazing how many programs can't be run with just a keyboard.

Why? I just don't know, and that's making me crazy. I don't know if I can trust my system. It seems as if I spend all day doing backups and rebooting.

It's now been over two weeks since I've had any of the problems above: my system stays bootable, my USB drivers haven't gone AWOL, and my backups are being done successfully.

I ran into some other problems, but one of them is on the Acronis US cloud servers and the other two were resolved by a complete uninstall, clean, and reinstall. So far as I can tell, I'm in the clear.