Data Protection Manager 2007 error ID 998

March 16, 2009 · Filed Under Data Protection Manager 2007, Exchange Server 2007 | 1,303 views

I’m currently doing some testing with Exchange Server 2007 and Data Protection Manager 2007 on Hyper-V. As I needed several VMs for the testing, I just installed one and then used NewSID to change the VM SID and name before joining each one to my test domain. Later, upon attempting to configure a new protection group on DPM for one of the Exchange servers I got this error:

The operation failed because of a protection agent failure.

Retry the operation.

ID: 998
Details: Unknown error (0×80042318) (0×80042318)

dpm_vss_errors_newsid_01

After checking the usual suspects, including the required VSS patch on the Exchange server to be protected and examining the Event Logs on the Exchange Server I found lots of VSS errors with Event ID 12302 on the Exchange server.

dpm_vss_errors_newsid_02

Tt turns out the problem is actually with using NewSID…it doesn’t play well with VSS. The solution’s pretty simple once you find it–here’s one place it resides. The steps are as follows:

Stop the Microsoft Shadow Copy Provider & Volume Shadow Copy Service.
Export the contents of the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem key to a .reg file (as a backup).
Delete the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem\{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}\Subscriptions key. (Just delete the Subscriptions subkey; leave the EventClasses key.)
Restart the server.
Run the “VSSADMIN LIST WRITERS” command, which should procude output similar to that shown below.

dpm_vss_errors_newsid_03

This causes the VSS entries in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem\{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}\Subscriptions key to be rebuilt when the writers initialize.

If that does not resolve the problem, check the Sysinternals forum link mentioned above for more steps.