KB 833167 - A Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) update package

We did a SBS 4.5 to 2003 migration this past weekend and while doing our post migration monitoring support we started to see that the backup was failing in the admin email sent out. Well the backup wasn't really failing as in "oh my God nothing is getting backed up" but rather with SBS 2003 the backup begins by doing a Volume Shadow Copy and then uses that to process the backup. That's why we can get the SQL and Exchange and running services now in the regular ntbackup. Great job by the way on Microsoft for doing this as Backup Exec is hardly used anymore for us in rollouts.

But this one had us a little stumped. We were getting the error: Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy: 800423f2. Well a quick search on Google groups and we quickly realized that a supported hotfix for KB 833167 was needed. VSS needed updating and that appears to have fixed our problems.

The cost:$0. Hotfixes can be gotten for free and as you can notice there are plenty of them out there until a real Service Pack comes out. With the SP for Windows Server 2003 and the SBS 2003 SP probably delayed until first or second quarter next year these hotfixes will continue to gap some holes (minor ones at that) in Windows Server and SBS 2003.