Issues with Creating a System Image onto a Network Storage Location

[Appleboy45]

Short story: Trying to backup an HP Pavilion p7-1534 running Windows 8.1 using the builtin Windows System Image Backup utility. Trying to backup onto a network share that consists of an external hard drive connected to another PC on the same network (network is a typical home network. Xfinity modem, but with an 8 port switch connected for other Ethernet devices). Both PCs are connected to the same switch over Ethernet. When I run the image utility, put in the share to back up to, select the partitions I want backed up, and start the process, it quickly fails the backup and says "Catastrophic Failure (0x8000FFFF)". I don't think it's an issue with the username and password I'm putting in because if I put in something else, I get a different error saying that the HP couldn't read the network share, so I don't think authentication is the issue? Anything I could be missing?

 

Things tried already

1. Checked the Volume Shadow Copy service to see if it is running - it's running

2. Run sfc /scannow - There were errors that sfc couldn't correct.

3. Run chkdsk /scan - Passed

 

 

 

Additional context (if you want to read): I recently bought a 4TB Seagate Backup Plus hard drive at a very good price from Goodwill. Thing only had a couple hours on it. I figured since I have quite a few computers in my household that don't have backups, I would see if I can some how connect it to my gaming PC that is always on and make a share on the network for computers to connect to for backups. I plugged in the hard drive (after testing it on another computer I didn't care about since it was an unknown, used USB device), formatted it, partition it for each computer, mounted each partition in a folder in the main partition for the hard drive, and then made a network share out of the main partition. I already have two computers running backups to the network share. These are older machines running Windows XP and Windows Vista (yes they're old and out of date, but I don't use them enough to justify upgrading the OS and I prefer Windows over Linux. I already have a couple Windows 10 devices that get used a lot more).

 

Yes, I know I can use File History to allow me to recovery individual files easily, but considering how this computer is used and how it also has the original recovery partition, I would rather have an image of the drive I can easily restore. If I can't figure it out in Windows, I may resort to Linux utilities, or I may just temporarily move the computer so I can directly plug it in to the hard drive.

 

The partition I allocated for this HP is about 975GB. The hard drive in the HP is a 1TB with 931GB of usable space, so space on the back up partition shouldn't be an issue. The HP has 110GB free, and part of me wonders if I need more space to start the backup. Seems unlikely, but I may freeing up space if I don't get any other answers.

 

A lot of this is experimental for me as I'm just getting into networking, and I'm not at a point in my classes where we are talking about network shares and servers. Feel free to point out the basics or the obvious.