Windows System Image backup failing

highstream said:

I don’t have a clue how to solve the reported XML errors, but I’ll run SR once again to check the error message. The only two other things I can think of are to 1) disconnect all the non system drives (5) temporarily to run the backup — I had to do that some years ago to get through an upgrade of Win 8 that kept stalling; 2) move SATA cables around so that disk numbers are optimally ordered, but I read that’s no longer necessary — and the weekly backups have never had problem with the current ordering. So my guess is #1 is the next step.

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It’s so unreliable that I’ve done this simple and straight forward within Windows backup method hundreds of times without failure until the day I swapped in a new non system HDD, in the process moving around what a couple of non system HDDs backed up. That is the context and subject of this thread. Right now I’m getting both VSS and SR failures that shouldn’t happen. Do you have something to offer directly related to fixing those?

Try restoring a recent backup to see if the issue persists - if not, then your latest Windows installation has issues.

I found the solution by going ahead with my next best guess as mentioned earlier: disconnect all the non-system drives and test the backup by reconnecting them one by one. The backup worked fine with each except with the two cloned HDDs, which for some reason VSS did not like. Once I cleared the partitions on those, the backup proceeded as it should. So unless running the backups again from SyncBack Pro recreates the problem, and that's doubtful, it does look solved. I haven't run an SR yet, but imagine it will work.

@ignatzatsonic When I booted without the other drives, Windows threw up a message about the page file not being found. That jogged a long ago memory that I had moved it to another drive. And since in this project I had taken three HDDs, one new, cloned two and pulled one, it may be that the page file got mixed up in all that and caused the problem -- or not.

@Bree Thanks for the parameters idea, but it didn't solve the problem.

@dalchina Thanks for the persistence and suggestions, even if I was hesitant to use tweaking.com (it has improved).

@dalchina Thanks for the persistence, even if you focused a lot on Macrium.

Pardon? Think you have the wrong person. I tried from post#4 to get you to look at the configuration of your backup job.

Anyway, you resolved it- remotely it's guesswork.

highstream said:

I found the solution by going ahead with my next best guess as mentioned earlier: disconnect all the non-system drives and test the backup by reconnecting them one by one. The backup worked fine with each except with the two cloned HDDs, which for some reason VSS did not like. Once I cleared the partitions on those, the backup proceeded as it should. So unless running the backups again from SyncBack Pro recreates the problem, and that's doubtful, it does look solved. I haven't run an SR yet, but imagine it will work.

@ignatzatsonic When I booted without the other drives, Windows threw up a message about the page file not being found. That jogged a long ago memory that I had moved it to another drive. And since in this project I had taken three HDDs, one new, cloned two and pulled one, it may be that the page file got mixed up in all that and caused the problem -- or not.

@Bree Thanks for the parameters idea, but it didn't solve the problem.

@dalchina Thanks for the persistence and suggestions, even if I was hesitant to use tweaking.com (it has improved).

I'll let you work out why your rude quote about me was deleted. You mentioned having two cloned drives connected at the same time. These will have the same disk ID which could cause issues.

highstream said:

They didn't the same disk ID. I made sure of that. And what does that have to do with a bad Windows install? Or what Macrium had to do solving my immediate problem? I hope you'll move on and mull over our discussion.

Yet another arrogant post. You won't get much help if you carry on in that way. Normally cloned disks will have the same ID but it seems you spotted that pitfall.