Unexposing a snapshot in XP (Volume Shadow Copy)

Question

Microsoft provides a way of mounting a read-only snapshot as a volume using their vshadow program. However, it does not provide a way to unmount the snapshot (I wonder what would happen if I deleted the snapshot?). Going through the documentation on MSDN I found UnexposeSnapshot Method, and added the ability to use it in the vshadow. However, it says that it's only supported for Vista and Server 2008 machines. Is there anyway around this? The XP configuration for vshadow won't compile. It would be really bizarre if Microsoft wrote a way to mount volume shadow copies in XP and server 2003, yet didn't provide a way to unmount them.

Any ideas?

Hoenack

Sure looks like you can't 'unexpose' it without Vista... I wouldn't be surprised if you had to reboot to unmount the snapshot, because you likely can't delete it while it's mounted. – Ruddie

And that is worth the downvote? That was the whole point of the question. +1 – Postconsonantal

Was not explaining the downvote (not my downvote either), just adding a comment. Which I will now have to delete if the answer below actually works. – Ruddie

Answer 1

Use Windows' built-in mount management utility mountvol.exe.

On API level, you should be able to use DeleteVolumeMountPoint.

Wampum

you can also just delete the snapshot. – Hoenack

Answer 2

There is a command line tool inside the Windows Vista platform sdk that can be used to create batch files that operate on snapshots. I don't know if you mean that one, but it definitively works this way: You invoke it and it will create the snapshot. Then it will launch another process that you specify. Then that process (e.g. another batch file or the same batch file) will run. When it ends, the command line tool will remove and delete the snapshot.

Inman