DHCP Jet Writer Failed status while using VSSADMIN List

During a scheduled backup with a common enterprise backup solution you could encounter a VSS_WS_FAILED_AT_FREEZE or Snapshot was unavailable error messages. This could cause the scheduled backup for the system to stop immediately.

As you may know... Windows 2003 (and above) includes Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) as a part of the OS. A lot of backup solutions makes strong use of VSS to backup the Windows 2003 System State and the system services.

Each system state and system service component has its own VSS "writer", which the backup software uses to backup up that component. Sometimes a writer could return the VSS_WS_FAILED_AT_FREEZE state code.

In this case it is the DHCP jet writer that has errors and do not want to collaborate with the backup agent software.

This can be checked by issuing the following command at the DOS prompt:

vssadmin list writers

Here's the output in this case:

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool


(C) Copyright 2001 Microsoft Corp.



Writer name: 'Dhcp Jet Writer' 


Writer Id: {be9ac81e-3619-421f-920f-4c6fea9e93ad} 


Writer Instance Id: {2f71cad9-230d-4cf4-b6d7-21c7342a5180} 


State: [9] Failed 


Last error: Retryable error

The DHCP jet writer is responsible for enumerating files required for the DHCP server role. This writer is an in-box writer for Windows Server operating system versions.

Microsoft states that VSS writer time-out errors might appear during a system-state backup if the audit log is extremely large. This could not be your case (but you could always check...).

A simple solution is just to restart the DHCP server service without rebooting the server. Everything will go well and you could successfully restart and complete the scheduled backup (running it manually eventually).

DHCP Jet Writer Failed status while using VSSADMIN List