Just a quick post today that hopefully saves you a lot of time. This took me 9 days to get to the bottom of even while working closely with the StorageCraft support personnel.
We were working on a brand new install of a Win 2019 RDP Solution for a client. Everything was going well and the final step was to install the backup solution on the RDP Session Host server. We downloaded the current Shadow Protect SPX version 6.8.4 MSI installation package and commenced the install procedure using the Control Panel item "Install Application on Remote Desktop Server".
The installation commenced as expected, but right at the end the installation fails and rolls back, without giving any error message and in the event log you're presented with Event ID 1603 stating:
"StorageCraft ShadowProtect SPX Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error... blah, blah, blah"
I found the following article on the Storage Craft support page:
But trying every solution in that article produced no results. I even went through some unusual methods like:
- Creating a new admin user and using those credentials
- Logged on to the console and used the machine admin user
- Removed the ESET anti-virus software
- Changing the user environment variables for the temp folder location
- And numerous others
What was weird is that we could install any other software without issue and it would install and run perfectly.
So we finally decided to download another backup software package from another software provider in Veeam to see whether that would install. Veeam installed with out issue and we could run it, so we scheduled a backup task as per their recommended settings.
The following day we discovered that the Veeam backup had failed, and further investigation discovered that the Veeam software couldn't contact the VSS service to create a snapshot of the drive.
Hmmm, could this be the issue? We opened up the Windows services panel to check the status of the Volume Shadow Copy service. We discovered that the service had been set to Disabled, which is surprising because this was a fresh Windows install and no one had applied that setting to the system.
To fix the issue we set the Startup Type to Manual. DO NOT Set the Startup Type to Automatic because other services take exception to this.
To test our theory, we now tried to re-install ShadowProtect and what do you know, install went without a hitch and all backups work as expected. It would have saved a lot of time and effort if the ShadowProtect installation package gave accurate feedback as to why it had failed in the first place, then all of this troubleshooting and mucking around could have been avoided.
Hope this has saved you some time...
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