Found a couple of 3 and 4 yr old threads on this system restore problem. Both pointed at Kaspersky or something called Tuneup Utility. I haven't had either on this laptop and, honestly I don't know how long I've been without System Restore. I have several macrium free images I can restore to, but now and then it's nice to be able to go back a day or two to remove something. Today, I wanted to do just that and System Restore is grayed out and I got a popup saying I had an error 0x81000203. After prowling the web and trying all sorts of remedies, I've about given up so figured I'd try here. I've never used Kasperky, and never heard of the Tuneup Utility thing. It isn't a major calamity, but is annoying in that everything else is running well on this machine, Win 10 Pro, 64 bit, HP 355G2 laptop with 8G RAM.
Did you try the fixes listed in this article: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/system-restore-error-code-0x81000203 . Also many AV's will conflict with System Restore if run directly from Windows. Boot into Safe mode or better yet, from Win 10 Recovery Environment, and run System Restore from there. Note that running System Restore to recovery from a prior restore point will only work if it was previously functional and previous restore points exist. As I recollect, I believe SR might not be enabled by Win 10 by default in certain upgrade situations and the like.
I've had similar issues when I had Kaspersky and Acronis installed at the same time. The Volume Shadow Copy service gets corrupted. The only fix I was able to find was to restore a disk image and remove the offending software. In my case this was Acronis. I never found a repair that got it working again so the image restore was my only option. Check that this service can be started. If not you will probably need to restore a backup from when it worked.
I think an image restore is the only answer. I can move current documents to an external before taking the step. What I don't know is what caused it, or when it happened. Maybe a Windows Update? Then, if it was, which one? I've got several images, going back to December. I guess pick one and see what happens.
I doubt this is due to a Windows update. More likely 3rd party software. Usually disk imaging and/or security software. The fun part is that you won't know it happened until you try to run something that doesn't work, days or weeks after the fact.
I restored a backup image from Jan 13, 2020, and system restore is functioning. Whatever caused it had to have happened after that date, and I haven't a clue. I haven't downloaded anything, and the software I have on board mostly just sits there, except for LibreOffice and Final Draft, a screenplay writing software I've had for a decade. Macrium is the other busy one, doing a full backup every 3 weeks or a month. My security is in my sig, and it's been there for several months without a change (almost a record for me). I may never know what happened, but thanks to Macrium it's fixed with no loss, along with my moving some things to an external drive before restoring.
