I have a Win8 pro client PC that I use at my shop, it was/is setup with my whs2011 server that I have at the shop as well. It backed up fine until yesterday. The problem lies within the fact that I had the OS originally setup on a 60GB SSD drive and cloned that drive to a new 120GB SSD drive.
The cloning of the disk went fine, the PC functions perfectly fine, it's just that after I cloned and started the PC on the new SSD, two things happened (or rather didn't happen), that I've always seen happen when I do this on win 7 machines.
First was the initial bootup. Always before, when I clone a drive with win 7 on it, it loads to the desktop, once there, it loads new drivers (or whatever) for the new OS drive and asks to be restarted. Win 8 didn't do that.
Second is that whs2011 didn't tell me this particular client had a new drive installed and backup needed to be configured for it (it ALWAYS did this with a win7 drive clone).
What I did was open the dashboard from said client and selected the option to configure the back, just to make sure. That was all fine. I didn't try a manual backup, it failed last night during the auto backup. I noticed this today, tried a manual backup and no joy.
A little history of this win 8 pro client. It started life as a Win XP 32 bit PC. I purchased the win 8 pro upgrade disks. I don't recall the actual process, but a person cannot upgrade from win xp 32 bit to win 8 64 bit (the upgrade disks come with both 32 and 64 bit versions). I believe the correct procedure was to insert the win 8 pro 64 bit dvd, start the upgrade, it tells me I can't do this, it has to be a clean install, and then it reboots and starts the clean install. Regardless of how it was installed, it went smoothly.
One thing I should mention is that with the win xp OS installed, the 60 GB SSD was one large single partition, there was no system partition. When I wanted to try out xp on a SSD, my research showed that XP would treat it like a HDD and the best way to partition and format the drive was to simply have a win 7 PC create the partition and format it, then place the drive in the PC a person wishes to install XP on, and don't delete the partition that was created, just install to it. So.... Win XP was install and there was no system partition, just one large partition.
When I installed win 8 Pro, it simply installed into this one large partition without altering the partition. In the disk management service, it shows as one large partition, NTSF, (it should be MBR, but I failed to verify). When I cloned the drive, it remained one large partition.
I ran vssadmin list writers, and there were 11 writers, 3 had failed/timed out, the rest were fine. I realized I had never restarted the PC after initially booting up on the newly cloned drive, so I restarted the PC, and ran the same vssadmin command, this time all 11 writers passed. I checked providers and there is only the one Microsoft shadow copy provider (or at least that's how I recall the name of the provider).
I believe I need to boot the client with the win 8 dvd and select repair, possibly to correct what could possibly be an MBR issue?
Anyway, that is the next thing I was going to try. If someone has anything else to check/or do to fix the problem, I'd love to hear it. I removed the client from the server, uninstalled the connector software, reinstalled the connector software and tried to run a backup again, but still no joy.
I'd really like to avoid having to reinstall win 8 on this machine as it only has one purpose and that is to write estimates from. Reinstalling the OS would require reinstalling the estimating software which requires me to call in to support to have them get me registered again (which isn't really an issue, but I just put this machine in to operation a month again and had to call in then to get it registered....)
It didn't even dawn on me to verify the backup function working before I committed this clients old 60 GB SSD to another client PC(a minecraft server for my kids and friends of all things...)