Vista can do some pretty ridiculous things but this is one that really got to me recently. I transferred Vista to a new hard drive and the only thing I thought that caused was some activation problems. I was wrong.

It came to a point yesterday where performing a system restore might have been advantageous to me; unfortunately Vista had some other ideas. I got this cryptic error message:

“Name or volume label syntax is incorrect. (0×8007007B). System Restore will now close.”

Okay. It took me a few minutes to figure out what that meant and how to fix it. Basically it was saying that the drive system restore was “backing up” to was missing. Why couldn’t it have just said that instead? I think Microsoft needs to rethink their error messages. At any rate the solution wasn’t immediately obvious either.

To fix this you need to run SystemPropertiesProtection.exe from the start menu search box and go to the System Protection tab to change system restore from “Missing Volume” to C: (System) or any other drive that is actually installed in the computer.

This is probably the dumbest thing Vista has done so far. Not only is it not possible to transfer Vista to a new hard drive (only) without calling Microsoft for a new license key, it seems that doing so will also break system restore which requires YOUR intervention to fix.

Why couldn’t the error message have said “System Restore is set to an incorrect Volume, select a new volume” and allow you to change it right then and there. Or better yet, warn you its actually broken BEFORE you try using it. I guess Microsoft feels most of their users aren’t going to transfer their OS to a new hard drive and therefore most users won’t encounter these problems but those that do are “advanced” users and will “figure it out.”

What about IT departments, corporations and businesses that need to deploy Vista on a wide scale, which means that Vista may be transferred to different hard drives which means that all of this will need to be fixed which was not required in XP. It’s just another hoop to jump through I suppose, better get used to it now.

As a side note error “0×8007007B” is used to describe several file operation or install failures in Vista.

---

Related:

Vista isn’t the worst OS Microsoft produced nor is it the best

How to backup your OEM Vista activation

Malware hijacks Windows update component

Vista SP1 serves up its own sets of problems

How to fix Vista’s Security Center from reporting missing or duplicate programs

Entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 4:01 am under Microsoft, Tips, Vista.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.