I’ve been trying to back up my notebook PC in the form of a Windows 7 System Image (which will, helpfully, create some VHDs for me) but kept on coming up against the following error:

Create a system image

The backup failed.

The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination. If the source or the destination volume is on a disk, run CHKDSK /R on the source or destination volume and then retry the operation. (0x8078012D)

Additional Information:
The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. (0x8007045D)

I’m pretty sure that my disks are OK but it struck me this might be a side effect of using a third-party full disk encryption product (BeCrypt DiskProtect) so I checked to see if colleagues were able to back up their systems (they were).

Unfortunately, it takes a couple of hours to reproduce the error, so I didn’t take the usual, logical, step by step approach to resolving this one.  It was either:

• 0x8078012D – Bad sector, fixed with chkdsk /r (which takes an age to run on an encrypted volume)

or

• 0x8007045D – Manually starting the Volume Shadow Copy service.

Either way, these to changes let me complete the backup successfully – and this post may help someone else in the same situation on day…