When I click on the Shadow Copies tab within Explorer for a drive, I get the following error message: Initialization Failed. Error 0x80070424. The specified service does not exist as an installed service. Any help on how to remedy this is appreciated. Otherwise I'll be reinstalling 2008 R2 again this weekend. Eric

1. What would you expect from "When I click on the Shadow Copies tab within Explorer for a drive"? 2. Is there any 3rd party program that uses shadow copy? (Backup) 3. You can get some insight into what happens by issuing Process Monitor (sysinternals). Regards Milos

Please check the Services console the presence of the Volume Shadow Copy service. If it there, please try to start it and report back the result. Also, provide us any related events in Application and System sections of the Event Viewer. Please VOTE as HELPFUL if the post helps you and remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi Milos, 1) Typically I expect to see all my drives/partitions listed out with notification as to whether or not shadow copy has been enabled for those drives. Instead I see nothing except for the message indication that there has been an error initializing the service. 2) No 3rd party programs installed 3) I'll have to look into this. My gut feeling is that I'm just going to have to re-install the entire server OS and spend another few hours getting everything patched and brought current. Fortunately, I know what caused my headaches and will not be repeating my mistake. Eric

I could not find anything in the event log. And Volume Shadow Copy is not listed at all either.

Download the following tool and then run it on your problematic server: http://ftp.gfisoftware.com/support/fix-vss-reg.zip Restart the server and try to find the Volume Shadow Copy service in Services console and then report back the result. Please VOTE as HELPFUL if the post helps you and remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Actually, I decided that since outside of time alone, in and of itself, I chose to simply reinstall the OS completely. So, I spent 4 hours yesterday reinstalling the OS and necessary applications and then downloaded the 100 or so updates and now it's running fine. I'm not about to commit the same set of actions that got me in this boat in the first place either. Thanks to all who lent a helping hand. Eric