Dell e6420 problem creating System Image

[PosslPussl]

Hello All,
I am definitely no expert when it comes to backup, haven't ever bothered much with it (foolish I know) but since I am about to mess about the the OS on my laptop, which may not achieve what I'm hoping for, I'd like to be able to restore the machine to exactly what I have now, which works well enough (but not perfectly).

So I decided to make a system image and a system repair disk. I've never done this before, but from a bit of research it seemed simple enough.

There's not much on this laptop, only 40GB total on the hard drive.

I plugged in a 2TB portable drive with 1.3 TB free, went to Control Panel/ Backup and Restore/ Create System Image, Windows found the portable drive, I clicked next, got the "confirm your backup settings" window, (see screenshot), clicked start backup, and after a few seconds I got the "backup failed" message.(See screenshot)

Well I haven't the faintest idea what that message means, it may as well be Chinese for all the sense I can make of it.
What's it all about please? What am I doing wrong? Can anybody enlighten me?

Thanks, PosslPussl

 

[SIW2]

The system partition is likely too full.
That is a machine from 2012 so almost ceratinly your disk is mbr partition style.
One way to fix it:

from an administrator command prompt type:
diskpart
sel vol c
act
exi
bcdboot c:\windows

 

[PosslPussl]

Hello S1W2,
thanks for your reply. I'm a bit nervous about that fix though, what does it actually do? Does it make some sort of permanent change to my system? I don't want to break anything in the process of getting my system image.

I've researched that backup failed error message 0x80780119 and found this site

Fix the 0x80780119 error when creating a System Image in Windows 7 and 8 - TechRepublic

which seems to explain the problem (although the fix doesn't work)

Look at the disk management screenshot for my HDD. The system partition is 55 MB, with only 24 MB fre space, which breaks the rules. The TechRepublic site says any volume under 500 MB must have at leat 50 MB free space, otherwise the "Volume Shadow Copy" feature can't do its thing.

So we seem to have identified the problem.

The fix given is

1) give the partition a letter (I used Q)
2) use Administrator command prompt to enter <fsutil usn deletejournal /N /D Q:>
3 Then remove the partition letter.

When I attempt this, command prompt gives error message "The volume change journal is not active" (see command prompt screenshot)


So now I am stuck, I can't find any info on how to get past this point.) It looks like I won't be able to create a system image with windows backup and restore. A third party app perhaps? Any suggestions?

Thanks - PosslPussl