It is one of those days. Decided to install ShadowProtect 3.1 on my WinXP laptop and on the first try hit this error:

17-Dec-2007 13:15:57    service    199    all possible methods:  VSS API by default provider VSNAP API directly VSS API by STC provider and no other alternate methods
17-Dec-2007 13:15:57    service    302    Cannot take snapshot. Error: VSS provider bad state. Method:  VSS API by STC provider. Volumes count: 1.

vssadmin list writers only shows Error: 0x8000FFFF and nothing more. Uhuh, something hosed VSS, great. Deleted some stuff in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\EventSystem\{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}\Subscriptions, re-regged a bunch of DLLs, rebooted, still same error. To cut a long story short, you might want to look in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex\Catalogs and check if you have for example deinstalled Visio lately. If there is a visio key, delete it and VSS will turn back into workable condition.

Thank you Microsoft Visio people for wasting an hour of my life. Not.

Wow.  That's a crazy one, huh?  More amazing is that you figured it out.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have associated this with Visio.  Is Visio a VSS writer, by chance (I hadn't noticed before)?  Thanks for sharing the details.

Nate
 

Well I don't know what Visio wants with VSS. Maybe it uses some sort of internal MSDE or SQL server engine.

By the way. After fixing all this I also had the DPC type BSOD problem during backup. Caused by a buggy version of the Acr*n*s snapman.sys from their Disk Director product. After deinstallation I immediately checked the machine's UpperFilters parts in the registry, to find snapman.sys still there. After nuking that I discovered two more Acr*n*s drivers, tifsflt and timntr (some filter and a mounting device driver I presume). Maybe the programmers and installer writers grew up in Soviet Russia and this is "how you do it" over there.

Right now I'm in the market for a new partitioning tool that has a well designed bootable disk and can do NTFS/FAT grow/shrink.

As far as file system grow/shrink tools go, have you played with GParted (free bootable CD here)?  I haven't used it personally, I'm just curious what your take is on it (if any).

GParted makes no sense from an economical perspective because the tool I looked at tonight (Paragon Partition Manager Professional 8.5) costs 80 EUR which is less than our rate for an hour. In other words: If the "free" solution costs me 30-45 minutes anywhere (during a conversion operation, trying to work around booting problems, bugs in the software etc.) I am losing time, hair and ultimately money.

Without having tried it, some aspects jumped right into the eye:

I've ever only had one problem with driver support on Windows (ICH5R, because Intel suddenly dropped support for this chip in this mode from one driver revision to the next), but many more cases of Linux not recognizing RAID controllers, unstable behavior and so forth. And I am very picky with Linux rescue/live CD systems and not shy to roll my own with a custom kernel to boot (excuse the pun).

Functionality wise you can read they depend on things like ntfstools and that is where I stopped reading because this is no full blown NTFS support. Look at the screenshots and you will see they mess with the file system, mark it 'dirty' when they are done and then let Windows' chkdsk sort out the leftovers that need fixing. Granted chkdsk will fix all problems but this leaves bad taste in my mouth. With NTFS there is so much that can be done the wrong way, which is of course by design and willfully done on MS' part. Do encrypted and compressed files still work after GParted has resized a partition? I don't want to find out other than by reading other people's posts.

Bought by Symantec, currently at 8.0 and still not compatible with Vista's/Win2k8 NTFS version 5.x, which has a different sparse file handling and also transactional capabilities. To quote Duke Nukem: What are they waiting for... christmas?

Have you tried BING? That's what I use. 

This solution worked for me. I found the Visio folder and just deleted it.  Now when I run vssadmin list writers it doesn't come up with Error: 0x8000FFFF.