I ran into a weird issue today while performing a P2V migration. The process would get to 40% and stop stating that the VSS Writer service stopped responding.
Here is the error from the VMM Admin console job:
In the Application Log, the error showed up as follows:
In the System Log, the corresponding error was:
Is Services, the Volume Shadow Copy service was set to Started.
While troubleshooting the message from the Application Log, I was led to confirm that the “System Writer” was present as an association within the Volume Shadow Copy Service.
To verify this, from the Command Prompt, type:
vssadmin list writers
“System Writer” was not there! How to fix…? Now I had to really dig.
The solution was posted here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsbackup/thread/bb760434-de80-4cb6-ae9e-bd253e4b037c
It is quite the solution… Here goes. From and Administrator Command Prompt:
Takeown /f %windir%\winsxs\filemaps\* /a
icacls %windir%\winsxs\filemaps\*.* /grant "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(RX)"
icacls %windir%\winsxs\filemaps\*.* /grant "NT Service\trustedinstaller:(F)"
icacls %windir%\winsxs\filemaps\*.* /grant BUILTIN\Users:(RX)
- Stopped and started Cryptographic service
net stop cryptsvc
net start cryptsvc
Now, I verified again if “System Writer” was present. It was!
I successfully completed my P2V migration after this issue was resolved.