I just installed SP Desktop 3.2 on several computers, and all are running fine, except that on one of them the ShadowProtect Service does not start on boot up.  I have verified that the Startup Type is set to Automatic.  Two events are found in the System log, which I have attached.  They basically say that the service took more than 30 seconds to respond.

 If I manually start the service, or launch the program, everything then works normally, that is until the system is restarted.  Then the same thing all over again.

 Note that the SC Shadow Copy Provider Service does start on boot up.

I have tried manually disabling the service, restarting the computer, then resetting the service to automatic and restarting the computer again.  No change.

BTW, this is a WinXP SP2 system.

Any suggestions for a fix, or more info I could gather?

The first thing you should try is unregistering and reregistering the ShadowProtect Service.  Since you will have to reboot to see if it works anyway, the simplest way to do this is to uninstall, reboot, then reinstall ShadowProtect.

If this does not work, it could be that there is some kind of conflict with another service or program on the system.  To find out if that is the case, you can use 'msconfig' to turn off other services and startup items.  On the 'Services' tab, check the box to hide all Microsoft services, then disable the rest (except for ShadowProtect Service and StorageCraft Shadow Copy Provider).  Also, disable everything on the Startup Items tab.  Then reboot.

If ShadowProtect Service starts up automatically when Windows loads, then this could very well be a conflict, and we only need to determine which service or program is conflicting.  You might start by using 'msconfig' to turn everything back on except for "suspect" programs (i.e. security, virus scanning, other backup apps), and then if that doesn't help slowly turning off others until the ShadowProtect Service starts normally.  If this helps you identify a specific conflict, let us know.

Kevin

Thanks Kevin,

 I am currently running an evaluation copy with a few more weeks to go.  Of course, I do not expect the install cycle to reset the 30-day clock, but are there any problems I might encounter because this is an evaluation copy?  BTW, all the other systems are still running evaluation as well.

 I expect to be doing this troubleshooting on the weekend, so don't look for results until Monday.

 -Earl

Earl,

No, there there shouldn't be any problems with a reinstall.  The evaluation is fully functional, and the 30-day evaluation period will continue where it left off after reinstalling. Will wait to hear from you on Monday.  Thanks!

Kevin

The short headline is that none of the measures you suggested helped.  But I gathered some interesting information, and I have a plan. ;-)

Specifically, I uninstalled and reinstalled.  No change.  I even tried the Repair option.  No change.

I temporarily disabled all startups and all non-Microsoft services (except yours).  No change.

The first interesting news is that in the course of the various testing cycles, the SP service did automatically start (i.e., on boot) on one occasion!  But, alas, the behavior did not recur.  This suggests that the issue involves timing and resources.  Like something is stealing cycles from your service, so it cannot complete its initialization in the time allowed.  Hold that thought.

The second interesting news is that I was wrong about this being the only computer in the office with this issue.  In fact, there is one other with the same behavior.  That's good news obviously, because now I can focus on what's common to these two and not present on the ones that behave themselves.  One such common item is one of my usual suspects:  McAfee.  But there are some other strange things going on with these two computers, which I will not elaborate until I know more. 

So that my client can have the benefit of your backups without waiting for this to be resolved, I intend to put an "sc start shadowprotectsvc" batch cmd in the startup folder.  Hopefully there will be enough resources available when that runs.  I'll let you know if this bandaid does the trick for now.

Assuming that works, then at my convenience I will continue the troubleshooting, and post the resolution here.

Meanwhile, can you suggest any additional monitoring or diagnostic approaches, given where I'm at?  One of the first things I'll try is to use Sysinternals (now Microsoft) autoruns to disable more startup stuff than msconfig is able to do.  Any thing else come to mind?

Thanks,

-Earl

The bandaid mentioned in my previous post did the trick.  ShadowProtect should now operate as I expect until we find a proper fix.

The sc start command generally takes more than 30 seconds to complete and start the service (actually two instances).  In one case I clocked it at a full two minutes.  Apparently the 30 second time-out does not apply to an sc command run from the start menu.  Is there any way of telling Windows XP (Pro) to wait more than 30 seconds for a service to start automatically?

 -Earl

I'm not sure if this addresses your issue or not....but you can always tell Windows what to do if a services fails. In the Service manager, select the service properties and then the Recovery tab. If the services initially fails you can get Windows to try to restart it x number of times. When you select "Restart service" you will have to option to define how many minutes Windows waits before attempting to start the service again.

I'll give it a try.  The question is whether not starting up counts as a "failure."  I'll post the result.  Thanks for the idea.

No joy.  Apparently the Recovery tab provides options for failures that occur after the service has started.  It does not invoke an action if the service does not start at all.

So I'm continuing to execute a "sc start shadowprotectsvc" cmd in the Windows Startup folder.  But hold on, there's more data:

On one of the two computers where I installed this bandaid, I observed that once even the bandaid did not work.  That is, there were two time-out errors in the system log.  This did not recur, but this is the same computer where the automatic start also worked once.  This computer takes a couple of minutes to fully boot, so maybe there is a lot of variability in resource availability during that process.

So in desperation, I inserted the following command before the sc start:

     ping 1.0.0.0 -n 1 -w 30000

This has the effect of introducing a 30 second delay before the start command.  So far that is working.  I am confident I can get the service to reliably start by increasing the delay enough, because a manual start after the boot settles down quickly starts the service.

Even though this seems to work for now, it's a bit of a kludge, and I would welcome any additional insights into what might be going on.

I'm not sure if this is useful/recommended/relevant/dangerous or just background noise on my part, but there is a white paper explaining how to enable System Event Logging for the Snap Shot Driver:

http://forum.storagecraft.com/Community/files/folders/supportwhitepapers/entry308.aspx

I've not tried it and have no idea how verbose it is, or whether it will even help in you case.....but you never know.