I have been using Paragon Backup (free) on a Win7 system successfully. After converting to dual boot Win7 and Linux, PB stopped working correctly. Specifically, the VSS service was terminating with error 0x11112. PB reboots and then does a backup in stand-alone mode. DriveImageXML, which also uses VSS, did continue using VSS correctly. The dual boot loader is grub V1, and I created a 130MB Linux booting partition for Linux and Win7. This partition was marked active. Originally the Win7 partition was marked active. One of the partitions must be marked active, to satisfy the MBR BIOS requirements, although it is not relevant to grub. (My BIOS is UEFI, a HP G7-2280 laptop, and is set to MBR compatible mode.) After some experimentation I found that the active flag set on the grub partition causes VSS to fail. Setting the Win7 partition to active again, allows PB to call VSS correctly. PB must force VSS to examine the active partition, when the target drive is C:. DriveImage does not force VSS do this, and VSS looks only at the Win7 partition, irrespective of partition table settings. When VSS terminates with the 0x11112 error code, a secondary problem arises. Drive letter assignment is turned off. Automounting must be re-enabled by the user, using diskpart --> automount enable.
