I have Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, with five VMs. Disk 0 is partitioned with a C drive for the Hyper-V OS and an E drive for the VMs.
I've been running a backup for several months now, using Windows Backup. The setup for the backup was a custom backup at night, strictly backing up the five VHDs files of my VMs.
Then the backup stopped working. Nothing changed on the Hyper-V, no update or reboot. (I know this because it's wanted me to reboot it for an update for months now.)
So I started with a reboot and letting it do its update to see if that fixed the problem. Which it didn't, I was still getting the same errors.
In the Event Log I have the following error:
The backup operation that started at '2012-09-11T22:00:00.188000000Z' has failed because the Volume Shadow Copy Service operation to create a shadow copy of the volumes being backed up failed with following error code '2155348129'. Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.
That Event Error message is followed by an Info Log
The VSS service is shutting down due to idle timeout.
When I run vssadmin list writers all writers are Stable with no errors except the Hyper-V VSS Writer:
Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer'
Writer Id: {66841cd4-6ded-4f4b-8f17-fd23f8ddc3de}
Writer Instance Id: {4afbd73d-09ca-4c39-b3ee-734a3f61f2ea}
State: [5] Waiting for completion
Last error: Unexpected error
In the process of trouble shooting I discovered that if I changed the backup to backup a file on the C drive it worked. But if I try to backup a file on my E drive it fails.
I’ve read a bunch of these forums and have not been able to find a similar problem or a solution that works. One solution that I have seen was that I may not have an Active partition marked. So I had a look at that, Disk 0 has the 100 MB Healthy (EFI System Partition) , then C: NTFS Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) and E: NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition). So I don’t have a Partition marked as Active, but the system still does boot properly. When I try to mark a partition as Active in the Disk Management the option is grayed out. When I try to set a partition as Active using DiskPart I get the following message.
The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk.
The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks.
In Disk Management if I right click on Disk 0 Convert to MBR Disk is grayed out, so I’m guessing it is a MBR disk. The fact that an Active Partition is missing may not be the root of my problem, I'm just reporting what I've discovered. I wish I could remember if there wasn't an Active partition while the backup was working.
Any suggestions?
