Hi, I bought an 8gb flash drive to perform a backup. I kept getting a can't access message and tried a few troubleshooting tools to no avail. my other flash drives work fine (not for back up). bought a new 8gb flash drive (in case the issue was with the other) and now the backup stops mid-way stating there is not enough space on the flash drive (the backup data is about 5.5gb) on a 8gb flash drive. i have to cancel because if i try and click either button option on the "insert a new disc" prompt, the pop up gets stuck and I have to force shut down. The error report stated: "Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:80042301" I don't know if it is the backup utility, the driver utility, a registry problem, something else, or all of the above. thanks for the help!4 people need an answerI do too

This evening, as part of monthly scheduled maintenance, on 7 XP Pro machines, all with the same software configuration, the monthly backup failed on 5 of the 7 machines with the error 80042301 using Windows Backup."Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:80042301"The machines all go through the same monthly procedure, in this order:Windows update Microsoft Security Essentials update and quickscan CCleaner update Java Update (no update needed) Adobe flash update (no update needed) Adobe Reader update (all machines updated) Quickbooks update (no update needed) CCleaner cleanup (only trash files, no registry cleaning (ever)) Disk cleanup (removed all except most recent restore point) Disk defrag And then the windows backup, to a second dedicated drive on each machine. As I said, the same procedure is used for all machines, regardless, every month following patch Tuesday.Five of the Seven machines all failed with the error 80042301. The other two completed their backups as they always have.All machines have the same administrator rights.Question: What is the common link? What is the problem? Why 5 of 7 failures, or why 2 of 7 successes? Any help appreciated.DocPS: Yes, I know this thread is a year old. But, it was the only one with the same error.Also, no blaming the procedure, as 2 of the 7 machines had no problem. And, this procedure has been in place for a year, with backups every month. Never before today has a failure occurred. Computers verified since 1972

The flash drive is formated FAT32 and as such it is limited to a maximum file size of 4GB. NTFS does not have this 4GB file size limit, format the flash drive to NTFS and you will be able to use it to store the backup.You will not be able to format the flash drive to NTFS if it is "Optimized for quick removal", to be able to format it NTFS it must be set to "Optimize for performance", see here:http://www.howtodothings.com/computers-internet/how-to-format-a-usb-flash-drive-with-the-ntfs-file-systemJohn

This is a Windows XP forum, you should start your own thread in an approptiate Windows 7 forum.John

John, my post is for XP, and I am not using flash drives, and I stated that all machines had a dedicated backup drive. I posted here because the problem is with XP, and the error is the same as I am experiencing with Windows Backup, on XP pro. The "7" that you see is the number of machines in my configuration - ALL ARE XP PRO. And, all drives are NTFS.Please read carefully, and help if you can.Doc Computers verified since 1972

Ok, I now understand the problem and have an answer.Of the 7 workstations, 6 are running a LOB app. The 7th workstation does not have this app.Of the 5 workstations that failed the backup, all had the same LOB app.So, why would one workstation with the LOB app, and one without the LOB app, succeed with the backup?Two weeks ago, the vendor of the LOB app did a massive update to their app. All seems to have worked correctly.Last week, one of the office personnel was trying to email a portion of an Excel spreadsheet. It failed. I looked up the error from the email attempt, quickly found the answer, and continued on thinking it was just a fluke. The fix I applied was to the one workstation where the backup succeeded last night.Surfing today for the backup error, I stumbled across one posting where they happened to solve their backup problem, rather simply. I noticed that their solution to the backup error was the same fix I did for the Excel email problem last week.So, I applied the same fix to the remaining 5 workstations with the backup error, and voila! The backup now runs as it should.It seems the LOB app upgrade somehow corrupted COM+ so that it could not be started, which interferred with VSS and Windows Backup.Without knowing a deeper explanation of the problem, the simple solution was to "REGSVR32 OLE32.DLL", which is the same command I did last week to fix the Excel email error.So, this explains why one workstation with the LOB app (and OLE32.dll re-registered last week), and the other workstation without the LOB app, both succeeded with the backup last night. It also explains why the other 5 workstations with the LOB app failed last night.The other five workstations ran the backup successfully today, after the fix was applied.I hope this is valuable to others experiencing the error.Doc Computers verified since 1972