Long boot time in Vista due to System Retore points

[Adam]

Hello,

I have a problem on a machine, which up until a couple of days ago had been
running Vista (32 bit) fine.

It is now taking around 5 minutes to boot. Previously, it was taking less
than a minute. Looking at the event logs, it appears to be anging because
my restore points are somehow not being created properly. I see the
following message in my event log during boot:

Source: volsnap

Event ID: 25

"The shadow copies of volume C: were deleted because the shadow copy storage
could not grow in time. Consider reducing the IO load on the system or
choose a shadow copy storage volume that is not being shadow copied"

After this event is logged, it appears that the system hangs for 5 minutes
or so... presumably while it's deleting the restore points.

If I switch off the system protection option, it boots fine.

The only thing which springs to mind is that I think this problem started
happening a couple of days ago, after I used System Restore to restore the
system to a previous point.

Thanks,
A.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

You might want to try disabling and restarting System Restore. You will lose
all existing points when you do it, but the issue may be caused by a
corruption of the index and the only way to remove it will be to rebuild it.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Adam]

Hi,

Thanks, but I've tried that with no luck! :-(

Regards,
A.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Did you reboot before restarting? And if you did, while it was disabled did
the delay still occur?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Adam]

Yes, I did reboot.

If I disable the system restore points (eg, uncheck the drive so no restore
points are created), the system boots fine (in about 20 seconds). If I
check the drive, and create a restore point, the system takes about 5
minutes to boot, and I see the volsnap event ID 25 (as below) in my system
event log.

Regards,
A.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

While disabled, delete the entire System Volume Information directory, this
may require taking ownership of it.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Adam]

Thanks - I'll give that a try, although I'm a little scared of deleting
it! - Will it effect anything else? Could you point me at a MS KB article
about this?

I've got a second drive in the machine, would it help if I simple selected
this disk as the location of the system restore files instead? - It's
something I was going to try last night, but didn't get time to in the end.

(Sorry to sound so suspision!)

Thanks,
A.

 

[Adam]

Nope, no joy. I've just tried that. I'm still getting the very long boot
time, and volspan error in the event log, unless I switch system restore
off.

I've also tried using the second drive as the location for the restore
points, but get the same problem.

A.

 

[Adam]

Okay, I *think* I've found the problem.

I've been playing with it this evening, and in the end started looking at
vssadmin to see how much space the restore point was using.

What I noticed, was that when I enabled restore points, and then created a
restore point, although the system would buzz away for a few minutes while
telling me to wait, once the Ok prompt appeared, if I looked at the shadow
storage via vssadmin, it would still keep getting bigger and bigger...
indicating that the restore point was still being created.

After about 10 minutes or so the size of the shadow storage would stabilize
(confirmed by vssadmin), and looking in Resource Monitor showed less disk
activity. If I wait until then before rebooting the system, I don't get the
volsnap error in the event log, the system boots quickly, and my restore
point is still available.

So - I'm not sure what's going on, but it would appear if you shut the
system down while, in the background, it's doing something with the shadow
storage, something somewhere goes awry on the next boot. It'll be
interesting to see if this problem occurs during everyday usage (not that I
tend to reboot my PC that often, I tend to use S3 mode).

Thanks for the input.

A.