Question : Have A Strange Volume Listed What Is It?

Hi,
I have a server running SBS 2008 and if I right click properties of the system drive C: and look at the "Shadow Copies" tab, there is a volume listed as:

\\?\Volume{d15ab5d8-7906-11de-a7d0-0024e851c5d5}\

If I look at the Details of this volume it says it is using 69,252 MB with free disk space of 1,243 MB and a total disk space of 152,607 MB.

These facts lead me to believe it is the external USB drive we use for backup. In the settings dialog it says that the storage area has "No limit" and in the shedule section there are two schedules at 07:00 and 12:00 each day of the working week.

In the Shadow Copies tab of the local disk C: properties dialog it says the "Next Run Time" is disabled. If that is the case why is the used space set to 69,252 MB. I have checked the backup and that produces no where near that amount of data.

If I look at the disk in "Share and Storage Management" which appears as "ThursdayBackup" it says its capacity is 149 GB and it has 1.21 GB free. So it smells to me like VSS is using teh drive for shadow copies. Also (and this is what kicked off this detective work) every day in teh logs at the time the end user ejects the backup drive and puts the next one in I get this entry in the event logs:

Ntfs      137      10/06/2010 08:28:34      1
Event Details:    
The default transaction resource manager on volume \\?\Volume{d15ab5be-7906-11de-a7d0-0024e851c5d5} encountered a non-retryable error and could not start. The data contains the error code.
volsnap      16      10/06/2010 08:28:07      1
Event Details:    
The shadow copies of volume \\?...06-11de-a7d0-0024e851c5d5} were aborted because volume \\?...06-11de-a7d0-0024e851c5d5}, which contains shadow copy storage for this shadow copy, was force dismounted.

Can anyone tell me how to stop this happening and whatever shadow copies is doing to swallow the disk space on the backup drive as I have to peridically format the backkup drives to recover the space as it fails the backup due to insufficient space.

Siv

Answer : Have A Strange Volume Listed What Is It?

Hmm, I think we lost the way here. Shadow copies are not taken off the external drive. One of your partitions are storing its shadow copies on this drive. Look the error message again:
"The shadow copies of volume \\?...06-11de-a7d0-0024e851c5d5} were aborted because volume \\?...06-11de-a7d0-0024e851c5d5}, which contains shadow copy storage for this shadow copy, was force dismounted."

!!!because volume \\?...06-11de-a7d0-0024e851c5d5}, which contains shadow copy storage for this shadow copy, was force dismounted!!!