Error 0x80780119 creating system image

[Nigel789]

Every six months or so I create system images for my PCs (all running Windows 11) on an external USB drive, and until today that has worked fine. However, today I have been able to create images successfully for two PCs but not the third, with the above error being reported:



I checked the free space on a PC that worked:



and on the one that didn't:



and as you can see, all partitions except the "C:" drive show 100% free and even that has more free space on the "failed" PC than on the "successful" one. (As an aside, 100% free sounds wrong for a receovery partition - it must contain something if it is of any use - but that seems to be what most people report.) The drive to which I am attempting to back up is an external USB drive, NTFS file system, approximately 1.5TB free (and I am not including the "D:" drive in the backup), so there is more than enough space. I have checked all disks for errors and found none (I didn't do a full surface scan), although I did notice one strange thing with the target drive; I could open the backup folders for the other PCs but not for the one that would fail. However, I could (and did) delete that folder.

I have looked at other posts here and elsewhere and tried to follow the suggestions, but many of them refer to a "system reserved" partition and I cannot see which one that is as none have a name anything like that, as you can see from the images above. I also looked at alternatives to the Microsoft tool but have been unable to find any that are free of charge (free trials are no use for something like this which I want to run every 6 months or so), and also no indication of what format the other tools produce - is it vhdx files like the Microsoft one, for example, which (in spite of claims to the contrary) DO allow recovery of individual files by mounting them as virtual disks.

I would welcome any suggestions for resolving this problem, please.

 

[RogerOver]

Are you sure you chose the right storage location ?
Your first screenshot (error message talking about "volume shadow copy") sounds to me as if Windows had tried to put the copy somewhere on your Disk 0 (and not on the external USB drive).

See: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+are+shadow+copies+stored&client=firefox-b-d

 

[Nigel789]

RogerOver, I think that's exactly what it does - it creates a shadow copy on the source disk(s) so that the backup doesn't hit problems if their content changes while it's in progress.

Anyway, I managed to solve the issue, so I thought I'd post what I did in case it helps others with the same problem.

First of all, Device Manager does not report disk usage correctly for the recovery partitions - they aren't 100% free.

What I did was install AOMEI Backupper (which apparently is free though its format is incompatible with Windows Backup), and that showed that the partition shown above as 990Mb (Disk 1 Partition 4) had less free space than the 320Mb that the dialog box said was required. So I ran Minitool Partition Wizard to increase the size of that partition (taking space from the C: drive), and everything worked correctly.

 

[RogerOver]

Ok, I am glad that you solved your problem !
(What I didn't understand was that you were saying:
"The drive to which I am attempting to back up is an external USB drive, NTFS file system, approximately 1.5TB free (and I am not including the "D:" drive in the backup), so there is more than enough space").