I wanted to share the resolution I found for the issue reported by VSS of a Windows Server 2008 R2. The error showed as ‘Initialization Failed. Error 0x80042304: The volume shadow copy provider is not registered in the system’ when I see the VSS tab of the drive properties as below:

I have seen various articles showing the resolution as re-registering the VSS dll files and none of the method helped in the resolution !

Finally, I checked the corresponding registry keys associated with VSS on a different server and found that there are some missing fields in the server which reported the issue. The registry keys associated are found at: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\VSS\Providers.

The Registry values should looks like as follows and on the problematic server the values under ‘Provider’ was shown as empty:

Finally, I sorted out the issue by adding the missing values: If you come across similar issue, you are advised to follow the similar way. I copied the following value in a .reg file and exported to the server reported issue and that fixed my issue

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\VSS\Providers\{b5946137-7b9f-4925-af80-51abd60b20d5}]
@=”Microsoft Software Shadow Copy provider 1.0″
“Type”=dword:00000001
“Version”=”1.0.0.7”
“VersionId”=”{00000001-0000-0000-0007-000000000001}”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\VSS\Providers\{b5946137-7b9f-4925-af80-51abd60b20d5}\CLSID]
@=”{65EE1DBA-8FF4-4a58-AC1C-3470EE2F376A}”

Happy to see the result of the solution as follows 🙂