topic Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation. in Other Norton Products

NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

kpruppel — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:44:52 GMT

Very similar story to many posts here. Ghost 14 running fine for weeks, then (with no MS updates or any changes AT ALL), backup finally fails with the "Must complete this operation inside the recovery environment", and Event log error is "Err EC8F17B7" followed by "Err E0BB001B Cannot lock volume because it contains the OS or has an active paging file."

I performed the steps instructed in the doc linked to for "This operation cannot be performed while Windows is running. ETC", the one that examines the SymSnapService, AND the registry fix (because the initial part did not solve the problem).

This started out of nowhere. The only clue I may be onto is that I swear at one time (and one time only!), when my cursor ran over the Ghost tray icon, there was a statement about being expired, but my copy is fully purchased and the Product Key applies with no problem.

AND, this is what happens also for a second backup job which contains only non-MS applications. It contains no OS or active paging file, yet I get the exact same error as I do for the C: drive backup.

Please help, as I live in great fear when I know I do not have my system backed up.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

Neville — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 08:28:30 GMT

Hi - I have experienced EXACTLY the same error as you. I spent just under 6 hours last night (until after midnight) with the Norton Helpdesk (who took control of my PC for most of that time) and they were unable to resolve my problem. In frustration I demanded that I was given a full refund which was processed.

However, I would like to persevere with Norton Ghost 14 and I would be very interested to learn of any solutions and I will re-purchase the product.

I am running Vista Ultimate and I am backing up to a NAS formatted as FAT32. The backup proceeds satisfactorily up to around 18% but then fails with the following error (retrieved from Ghost's log):

Backup. Error E0BB001B: Cannot lock volume \\?\Volume{e926b61d-c5b8-11db-bbd8-806e6f6e6963}\ because it contains the OS or has an active paging file.
Details: The volume contains system or paging files.

Source: Norton Ghost

Every time I hover my mouse above the system tray Ghost icon I see the "licence expired" message. There is always a brief "Symantec.ProtectorAuto1 COM error" when I first hover my mouse over the icon. My product was properly activated and installed (this also happened after the Symantec Help Desk re-installed my product).

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

kpruppel — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:02:27 GMT

I sent you a private message so we might continue this discussion on some other relevant topics. Thanks for your reply here, as this has been a very frustrating situation.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

Neville — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:18:04 GMT

Hi - your email did not arrive - perhaps it was eaten by my spam filter ... could you please resend to {removed}adding my email address in this forum should give my spam filter lots more to eat :P)

I have pretty much given up on using Ghost for iso images. It works fine for documents/folders but consistently fails for anything else. I use the built-in Vista backup/restore utility to create an iso-image (which I burn to DVD as well as copying to my NAS) and then use Ghost for anything else.

Neville

[edit: personal information removed per the Participation Guidelines and Terms of Service.]

Message Edited by Allen_K on 07-08-2008 09:18 PM

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

Neville — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:50:05 GMT

Just for information - this is the log entry describing the error message I had when I last tried to backup my C-Drive with Ghost ...

Error EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery points for job: My Computer Backup. Error E0BB001B: Cannot lock volume file: \\?\Volume{e926b61d-c5b8-11db-bbd8-806e6f6e6963}\ because it contains the OS or has an active paging file.

The error occurred about 20% of the way through the backup operation. I was backing up from a Vista Ultimate machine (logged on using the Administrator account) to a NAS (formatted as RAID 1 with the Linux EXT3 file system).

I do not think the destination drive caused the problem as I had exactly the same error when I tried to back up to my local D-Drive (a separate partition of my C-Drive on my ACER Aspire 9420 laptop). This also failed around 20% of the way through the backup.

Also, despite following the advice in other threads re-running services, my Ghost icon in the system tray still shows a COM error (sym.protectorAuto1 COM error number -21472210005) and incorrectly says the licence has expired.

Neville

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

mparenteau — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:41:35 GMT

I am having exactly the same problem. However, my backups work initially. They only stopped working after I did the "Live Update" -- since then I am getting exaclty the same error. My documents backup still works fine.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

kpruppel — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:42:35 GMT

No doubt about it. Reinstall Norton Ghost 14 and DO NOT RUN LIVEUPDATE! And like magic, it works again. Okay, so now how do we get this info to Symantec, that the LU is what is bad here? Is this forum moderated by a Norton tech? I hope so. And I hope they email every person who posted with this problem.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

fritz — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:38:22 GMT

Had the same problem in Vista Ultimate with and without SP1.

Step 3 definitely works

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/powerquest.nsf/0/7154f08552eef46265257401006f6a55?OpenDocument

cheers

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

kpruppel — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:56:23 GMT

Fritz, a small correction to your comment. Step 3 definitely worked for you. It did not work for me, and a number of other people. We are still waiting for Norton to pay attention to this.

After reinstalling Ghost 14 without running LiveUpdate (which has been my workaround so far, while waiting for Norton to finally figure this one out), now, it self-destructs when it comes time to delete an old recovery point when it has reached the threshold. I didn't even bother trying to talk with them about it, because it seems not work the headache waiting for Norton to pay attention. Ghost 14 is still totally unreliable as a backup/recovery system. I can't have an unprotected system while Norton fiddles for weeks at a time. Shame on Norton.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

jaygourley — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:47:04 GMT

Please help me confirm that this is the problem I face:

Ghost 14 makes My Documents backups okay and seems to make full disk backups okay, but it fails on every attempt to make an incremental backup. Ghost hangs at "calculating remainging time" "Initializing" "Reconciling Volume".

Error message:

Notification Type: Error
Priority: High
Description: Error EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery points for job: Drive Backup of Local Disk (C:\). Error E0BB001B: Cannot lock volume \\?\Volume{62568676-018e-11dc-8f74-00301bb49804}\ because it contains the OS or has an active paging file.
Details: The volume contains system or paging files.

What doesn't work:

1. Spending 10 hours chatting with four Symantec analysts and watching them explore my computer.

2. The steps recommended at http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/powerquest.nsf/0/7154f08552eef46265257401006f6a55?OpenDocument.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

Tony_Weiss — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:28:52 GMT

How did the instructions "What if this doesn't work" turn out? Did you follow those steps as well? What was the outcome? Any additional information you can provide is appreciated.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

jaygourley — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:32:17 GMT

Hi Tony--

Yes, I had tried reinstalling Ghost, as the link "if that doesn't work" you provided suggests, before I discovered this thread."

BTW, I'm still waiting to confirm that my problem is the same one discussed in this thread. I get the same error message. But would someone else experiencing the problem in this thread is experiencing the same symptoms I experience. Namely, . . .

1. Ghost makes file and full disk backups okay but will hangs at the beginning "reconciling volume" step of an incremental backup.

2. The incremental backup cannot be cancelled. The only way to cancel it is to restart the Ghost service.

--Jay

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

fritz — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:22:13 GMT

Hey kpruppel, I jumped the gun there by being very happy that it worked for me. I am sorry to hear that step 3 did not work for you. Hopefully there will be a solution soon.

Message Edited by fritz on 07-29-2008 05:22 AM

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

erik_carlstrom — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:05:36 GMT

Jay,

Could you post back what entries (and values) you have under the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SymSnapService] - Only entry needed if you're on Vista

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SymSnapService\Security]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SymSnapService\Enum]

Also, what is the state and startup type of the SymSnap Service?

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

jaygourley — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:46:22 GMT

Erik-- I attached screen shots of the three keys you asked for. --Jay

[Edit: Broken files removed. Please see this post for instructions on attaching files to forum threads]

Message Edited by Tony_Weiss on 08-05-2008 03:46 PM

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

erik_carlstrom — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:24:15 GMT

What Norton products are installed on your system? Does this only happen after running LiveUpdate?

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

marvbero — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:47:13 GMT

We're running Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery v8 (which has a lot of the same functionality and core modules as Ghost) and we had the same error messages on our Win XP pc's:

Error EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery points for job: backup-##. Error E0BB001B: Cannot lock volume \\?\Volume{####volume_id####}\ because it contains the OS or has an active paging file.
Details: The volume contains system or paging files.

We also found the following error messages in the Windows' Event Viewer:

- in Application:

Faulting application SymSnapService.exe, version 1.0.16.26308, faulting module SymSnapService.exe, version 1.0.16.26308, fault address 0x000c8fef.

- and 2 related errors in System:

1. The SymSnapService service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

and then,

2. The Service Control Manager tried to take a corrective action (Restart the service) after the unexpected termination of the SymSnapService service, but this action failed with the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

The errors started after an automatic LiveUpdate.

When we examined windows services, we found that the "SymSnapService" was totally missing.

The fix we got from Symantec was to open a DOS shell and navigate to:

"c:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec System Recovery\Shared\Drivers"

and then, in that directory, run the program symsnapservice.exe with the /service switch:

"symsnapservice.exe /service"

For you folks on Ghost, I'd just use Windows search to find the "symsnapservice.exe" program and then go to that directory in a DOS shell to run it.

For us, this totally repaired the registry and reinstated the SymSnapSerice and got our backups working again.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

jaygourley — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:48:10 GMT

I cannot test your solution because, after two months unable to make an incremental backup, my Ghost 14 started making incrmental backups the first week in August. I haven't had the problem since.

If your solution is correct then Symantec must have done something wrong in one of its live updates and corrected it in a subsequent live update -- and, oh yes, concealed that from customers like me who were wasting countless hours troubleshooting it.

I don't want to judge Symantec prematurely. But I try not to do business with companies that conceal problems that might hurt marketing even though the concealment causes existing customers to suffer.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

Johan_Jeffery — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:34:08 GMT

Symantec is continually updating it products to make them better. I know that on the Ghost team we regularly try to push fixes out via LiveUpdate. We want the product to be the best it can be and to met our customers needs. We do not hide issues or try to slip fixes in so as to conceal issues from our customers. Rather the problem is in communicating things so that everyone hears. We don't have a good mechanism for that. But despite that limitation, we will in our updates roll up all fixes to that point since we don't make a fix available to one customer that we do not make available to another.

I can say, however, that we fix LiveUpdate issues as quickly as we can. In 14.0.2, which you would have got at the first of August, there were no fixes to incrementals. However, taking an incremental is a complex process. Conceivably, something as simple as reregistering of the SymSnap service, which LiveUpdate does, could have 'fixed' a problem. Also, while I cannot give a time frame of when a fix will make it out, I can say that there are several issues from this forum that development is currently looking at. Two of them involve incrementals.

Re: NEW Ghost 14/Vista SP1 "Must complete inside recovery environment" situation.

bartuniek — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:56:12 GMT

I was having the same problem and was able to resolve it.

I made a clean install of Vista Ultimate SP1 on Vostro 1700. After all Windows Updates completed I decided to make an image of the entire drive. After installing Ghost, I ran LiveUpdate and attempted to make a One Time Backup to the second HDD, but got the same errors as everyone else here.

24 hours later I found this forum.

The initial steps suggested by the link below did not work.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/powerquest.nsf/0/7154f08552eef46265257401006f6a55?OpenDocument

So I followed the What if this didn't work? http://service1.symantec.com/Support/powerquest.nsf/docid/2008032100440062 and that worked for me. More importantly, I can run Live Update and it does not break Ghost. I am not sure if LU broke it in the first place, but it seems to work now.

Message Edited by bartuniek on 09-30-2008 06:56 AM