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From: EnderWiggins on 28 Apr 2010 08:37
This seems to be a very common problem, but no one seems to have a "clean"
solution. I have it on 2 out of the box installations, and one poster says
he has it on 5 machines.

Trying to use the wizard based backup in the Windows SBS Console. It fails
with
Backup unsuccessful
A Volume Shadow Copy Service operatoin failed. Unknown error (0x*00423f4)

The problem is with the SqlServerWriter. If I disable the service "SQL
Server VSS Writer" the backup completes successfully. As soon as it is
re-enabled the same failure re-occurs.

"vssadmin list writers" gives the following after a failure:

Writer name: 'SqlServerWriter'
Writer Id: {a65faa63-5ea8-4ebc-9dbd-a0c4db26912a}
Writer Instance Id: {4a86f412-7635-4af7-9f7f-e43d60b798ed}
State: [8] Failed
Last error: Non-retryable error

Some of the fixes I found suggest making your system volume active, but
state that this may make your system unbootable (?!).

One last piece that may be relevent. Both of my systems have dynamic drives
that are mirrored in Disk Managemment.

This is obviously a problem with SBS2008. Could someone at Microsoft please
explain a clean fix? Thank you!


From: Simon Thomson on 5 May 2010 22:04

"EnderWiggins" <EnderWiggins(a)discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:26498907-AA8D-4C23-A461-A11117DDB36B(a)microsoft.com...
> This seems to be a very common problem, but no one seems to have a "clean"
> solution. I have it on 2 out of the box installations, and one poster
> says
> he has it on 5 machines.
>
> Trying to use the wizard based backup in the Windows SBS Console. It
> fails
> with
> Backup unsuccessful
> A Volume Shadow Copy Service operatoin failed. Unknown error (0x*00423f4)
>
> The problem is with the SqlServerWriter. If I disable the service "SQL
> Server VSS Writer" the backup completes successfully. As soon as it is
> re-enabled the same failure re-occurs.
>
> "vssadmin list writers" gives the following after a failure:
>
> Writer name: 'SqlServerWriter'
> Writer Id: {a65faa63-5ea8-4ebc-9dbd-a0c4db26912a}
> Writer Instance Id: {4a86f412-7635-4af7-9f7f-e43d60b798ed}
> State: [8] Failed
> Last error: Non-retryable error
>
> Some of the fixes I found suggest making your system volume active, but
> state that this may make your system unbootable (?!).
>
> One last piece that may be relevent. Both of my systems have dynamic
> drives
> that are mirrored in Disk Managemment.
>
> This is obviously a problem with SBS2008. Could someone at Microsoft
> please
> explain a clean fix? Thank you!
>
>

I had a very similar problem and was working through it with Microsoft
partner support, until I sent them the logs and the found out we have SBS
running under VMware ESXi.
You can view the support thread here:

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/partnerwinserversbs/thread/32d6e3b6-3a92-4885-9bb0-2f7591cddb9e

The workaround I had was to stop the services associated with SBS backup and
re-register the dll's. This worked but the problem recurred after a restart.

I was working on a separate problem, also common with SBS 2008. This was
that the Network Service Account was being used for the SharePoint Search
Service and Content Access. This is the SBS 2008 default but it is an
incorrect configuration (AFAIK).

I configured new accounts for these two services and my SharePoint Search
errors went away and, unexpectedly, so did my SBS Backup VSS issue.

Which is logical if you think about it. The backup error is with the
SqlServerWriter. SharePoint runs on SQL so if SBS Backup is attempting to
read the SharePoint SQL database but does not have adequate permissions to
do so it is going to fail.

I'm sure there is much more to it but I have not seen this SBS Backup error
since I re configured the SharePoint Search service accounts.

HTH

Simon.

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