Cannot backup to Macrium Reflect Free

Hi,

Acronis is still present and the cause of the VSS problem.
Short of reinstalling the lot on a clean disk I don't know of any other solution.

Cheers,

Have you tried the shutdown I suggested? If not you should. Doing so will stop anything that might be stuck in a sleep state and release the drive from a locked state

Railtech said:

Have you tried the shutdown I suggested? If not you should. Doing so will stop anything that might be stuck in a sleep state and release the drive from a locked state

Yes, I've done that three times but still problems mentioned above!

fdegrove said:

Hi,

Acronis is still present and the cause of the VSS problem.
Short of reinstalling the lot on a clean disk I don't know of any other solution.

Cheers,

I did have Acronis until about a year ago and the system has been fine until about 3 days ago so I don't see how it can suddenly fail like this! I did a search in the registry and found no trace of it. Have you seen anything in my error reports telling you that Acronis is the culprit? If so, I could re-install it using Revo Uninstaller and then remove it under Revo control. I do have an Acronis recovery partition but I don't see how I can remove it without re-installing Acronis.. And I seem to have 3 recovery partitions so I don't know which is which anyway! Although that hasn't been a problem and may not be now.

Hi,

I did have Acronis until about a year ago and the system has been fine until about 3 days ago so I don't see how it can suddenly fail like this!

OK. In that case it must be something else. I'll see if I can of further help then.

Cheers,

OK, here we go. I went for the in place repair install and it worked like a charm! I now have Macrium working properly. I also fixed the problem with Aomei rescue CD not working. This was due to either a bad PE build or the Backupper Pro version that Giveaway of the Day offered. Once I ditched that and installed the Standard version again, all was well again.

Just some tidying up to do now..

Thanks very much folks, I appreciate your assistance!

Hi,

Glad to see you have it sorted. It's rarely Macrium that's at fault though. Most often VSS.

Cheers,

berti11,

Glad to see the in-place upgrade worked for you as I was going to advise that approach after doing some more research on your issue.

In your OP the error you posted :

GUID_NULL, &SnapshotID)" failed.
- Returned HRESULT = 0x8004230f
- Error text: VSS_E_UNEXPECTED_PROVIDER_ERROR
ERROR: COM call "m_pVssObject->BackupComplete(&pAsync)" failed.
- Returned HRESULT = 0x80042301
- Error text: VSS_E_BAD_STATE
ERROR: COM call "m_pVssObject->AddToSnapshotSet((LPWSTR)volume.c_str(), GUID_NULL, &SnapshotID)" failed.
- Returned HRESULT = 0x8004230f
- Error text: VSS_E_UNEXPECTED_PROVIDER_ERROR

The VSS_E_UNEXPECTED_PROVIDER_ERROR indicates that the issue occurs when a non standard sector size disk is involved in the backup task. Many users like you report that all was working well until suddenly the error appears.

The error is apparently a Windows issue and may well be tied to drive manufacturers performing some trickery with their drive controllers to accommodate large capacity disk (greater than 2TB) however some report the error with disk of 1TB capacity as well.

Standard sector count for a disk is 512. these larger disk or advanced format disks as they are called use 4096 sector counts. Apparently this results in the VSS error you report.

It is unknown why the in-place upgrade corrects this issue, it does work however the fix may be only temporary. Sounds like you had some other issues on your rig as well that the upgrade also resolved so you should be in great shape going forward. I notice that you also mention here that you have AOMEI Backupper installed. Running 2 similar products may not be the best of ideas as they may conflict with each other. I would suggest avoiding having either app load at system startup to reduce the chance of conflict.

"The error is apparently a Windows issue and may well be tied to drive manufacturers performing some trickery with their drive controllers to accommodate large capacity disk (greater than 2TB) however some report the error with disk of 1TB capacity as well."

I have been using a Samsung/Seagate M3 1TB for about 6-9 months now and it does seem to behave erratically. It will work for a while (I use it mainly for images) and then it will 'play up'. The progress bar for the image will stop in the same place for ages and if I then cancel the backup the blue light on the M3 is still chuntering away. I cannot even restart the laptop as the drive seems to be blocking it. The only way I can get round this is to pull the USB cable out. Not the ideal thing to do with a very important piece of kit! So it would appear then that there is nothing I can do to prevent this? Are all these 'new' disks going to be the same? I had thought of ditching the M3 or sending it back so I'm not sure now what to do. Several times now, in order to get it to work I have had to move all the files onto another partition or another USB drive, then delete any folders etc so the drive is empty and then it will work again so I move the folders and files back again! A chkdsk never finds any faults either.