Vista Virtual Disk Service stopping and starting continuously

Discussion in 'Software' started by dlb, Sep 10, 2011.

  1. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    64bit Windows Vista Home Premium - a client was getting a message from his Windows Home Server when trying to perform a backup from this Vista laptop to another PC (I think? I'm not all that familiar with Windows Home Server); the message was that chkdsk should be run on the Vista laptop. So I ran chkdsk (the client didn't know how and seemed to not want to learn). I noticed after (and before) running chkdsk that while in Windows, just sitting idle at the desktop, there was A LOT of hard drive activity with the LED flashing almost constantly. A quick look at the System event log shows the Virtual Disk Service starting and stopping continuously every 5-10 seconds. This can't be normal, or a good thing. There are 4 messages in the log repeated over and over:
    a) The Virtual Disk Service has entered the stopped state.
    b) Service stopped.
    c) The Virtual Disk Service has entered the running state.
    d) Service started.
    Messages "a" and "c" have an event ID of 7036; messages "b" and "d" have an event ID of 4. These are "Information" messages in the System event log. By reading thru the log, it looks like this loop of Virtual Disk Service activity started about 2 weeks ago after installing some Windows updates. The looping does not appear until Aug 28 2011.

    Ideas? Thoughts?
     
  2. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    I made a small error above: message "b" has an event ID of 4, and message "d" has an event ID of 3, not 4 as I stated above....

    This starting/stopping of VDS does not seem to impact performance, I'm just really curious as to why it's on a runaway stop/start cycle....
     
  3. abekl

    abekl First Sergeant

    Is this system by any chance running anything by symantec or Mcaffee? I saw in a technet forum that this cause the same problem for someone, and moving to a different vendor solved the problem.
     
  4. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    I think I read the same thing while researching this, and no, there is McAfee or Norton/Symantec software installed. There is, however, some backup/imaging software, and the client also mentioned something about having a problem with using Windows Home Server Backup on his home network, but with this PC only. He said the others are working normally.... since I'm not at his home on his network, there's not a lot I can do as far as that goes (and I know nothing about Windows Home Server Backup), but I have a feeling that this start/stop loop of the VDS may be at least partially the cause for his Home Server Backup problems.
     

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