A Windows Admin nightmare

The past weekend is one of the most tiring i had for years. Staying late here in the office to fix what I think, one of the worst problem in Windows 2003. It’s none other than volume shadow copy services (vss) that’s been hunting Microsoft and the NT systems administrators for several years now. The vss error below makes your NTbackup program crippled (as well as other 3rd party backup program that relies on shadow copies to backup open files).

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 Event ID: 8194
 Description:
 Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error querying for the IVssWriterCallback interface.  hr = 0x8007000e.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
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 Event ID: 12302
 Description:
 Volume Shadow Copy Service error: An internal inconsistency was detected in trying to contact shadow copy service writers.  Please check to see that the Event Service and Volume Shadow Copy Service are operating properly.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
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This is the first time I exhausted the power of google trying to find a working solution. There were a lot of unresolved posts about the same problem; One of the concern is that this started form Windows 2003 but even the latest Vista suffers from the same problem.

I’ve tried most of the like-able solutions suggested by Microsoft Engineers and other professionals but those fixes were unable to repair the problem. The only solution that came to me as i have no other options anymore, was to do a repair-installation (not clean installation) on my Windows 2003 PDC. But that damn idea came up after 3 tiring nights of trying to solve the problem.

Well, hopefully, by tomorrow, the helpdesk team will no longer report another backup failure.