System Imaging Stopped Working

[TheIgster]

For some reason and without warning, I had been using the system imaging within Windows Backup and now it will no longer work. I choose to create a system image and the prompt comes up saying it is searching for devices and it will not find an attached and turned on external hard drive anymore, that it was able to find and created a system image to previously.

It just sits there and spins it's wheels. I can't do anything else while it sits there and looks. If I try anything, including loading Task Manager, nothing happens. I can't get a thing to load. I have to hard boot the system. If I click Cancel while it's looking, the window goes away and it looks like the application shuts down, but again, I can't do anything further or run any other program, including Task Manager. A hard boot is required again.

Any ideas anyone? It had been working great and had restored twice from a full image without issue previously.

For now I am using Macrium Reflect Free Edition, but I liked how the Windows application worked and it was working just fine before.

 

[zigzag3143]

For some reason and without warning, I had been using the system imaging within Windows Backup and now it will no longer work. I choose to create a system image and the prompt comes up saying it is searching for devices and it will not find an attached and turned on external hard drive anymore, that it was able to find and created a system image to previously.

It just sits there and spins it's wheels. I can't do anything else while it sits there and looks. If I try anything, including loading Task Manager, nothing happens. I can't get a thing to load. I have to hard boot the system. If I click Cancel while it's looking, the window goes away and it looks like the application shuts down, but again, I can't do anything further or run any other program, including Task Manager. A hard boot is required again.

Any ideas anyone? It had been working great and had restored twice from a full image without issue previously.

For now I am using Macrium Reflect Free Edition, but I liked how the Windows application worked and it was working just fine before.

Igster

Have you looked in event viewer? there may be a comment about why (like a dependent service has stopped) let me know if you need help searching for it

Ken

 

[TheIgster]

OK, so the event viewer says the following:

The shadow copies of volume J: were deleted because the shadow copy storage could not grow in time. Consider reducing the IO load on the system or choose a shadow copy storage volume that is not being shadow copied.

J: is the external HD I image to. Not sure what would have changed though. I didn't change anything from the last time an image backup was done, other than deleting the system image before doing a new one, which I have always done.

I did also notice that every time I tried to use the backup app for imaging, my network meters would go nuts, although there was nothing else going on, on the system at the time and CPU usage was at 0%

 

[TheIgster]

I haven't tried it yet, but after looking in services, it looks like the VSS service was set to manual. Not quite sure how that could have happened. I never touched it.

I've enabled it again to see if it makes any difference. In the meantime, I did install Macrium Reflect and had since done a restore with it, without issue, so maybe I don't even need Windows system image.