lasthours@btinternet.com

Thanks fizban2, no luck unfortunately - fsutil reported a successful operation but post reboot same warning entry in the event log followed by the error and backup failure. I'm going to force a chkdsk to see if that make any difference but any other suggestions appreciated. thx Mark

Hope someone can help. Have worked with MS OSs since early dos/windows days and usually can solve issues with a web search - but not this one. Vista backup been working fine for months. No other changes except decided to test out Ubuntu. Took some time to get right with repartitioning etc but up and fine eventually and using windows bootloader. Used Paragon Partion tool as only one HDD and Vista tools not able to move/resize partitions.Both OSs work well (actually Vista is hugely slower but that's off topic) and both appear stable, Ubuntu can quite happily read/write to the NTFS volumes and some programs like thunderbird share the same config files. I 'lost' the CD drive which was annoying but eventually got that back. So all very nice and happy, no new hardware, no new software, Vista patched up to date (per auto settings). Had turned off system restore and shadow copies trying to use Vista shrink tool and forgot had done that. Next time the Vista backup ran it crashed out unable to make a shadow copy, so I reinstated that. Then backup runs into a 'catastrophic error'. The admin event says: File backup failed. The error is: Catastrophic failure (0x8000FFFF). Immediately before that is a warnings: File backup skipped the source disk C:\. The error is: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. (0x8007007B). The volume label looks fine but I re-entered it just in case. I can only assume mucking around with the MBR and/or the partitioning tool has somehow contributed. However, short of a system restore from a backup pre all the mucking about with Ubuntu I'm stumped. Any ideas welcomed. Thanks Mark