failed with the following error: "Write on "....bak" failed: 27(error not found) BACKUP DATABASE is terminating abnormally This issue has been puzzling me for some time now and I'm running out of ideas! Any help would be much appreciated! Here's the problem:

MS SQL Server 2008 running on Windows Server 2008R2 (Virtualized)
Database backups are failing for all (larger) Databases on a particular server. Error code 27 suggests "The drive cannot find the sector requested.".

There is plenty of available space on backup drive, and I have tried backing up to other drives on the server which also fail.

I am able to backup the system databases without any trouble. (presumably due to their small size)

I created a new blank database and was able to back this up.

Manual backups of the main Databases fail (using 'right click' or TSQL). They get to 30% and the fail as if they have run out of space.

This is a virtual server running on a two node cluster. I've tried failing the VM to the other node, but this doesn't help.

Tried splitting the backup into five parts, but the job starts hanging again at 30%.

I tried manually copying one of the old backups to the drive using Windows Explorer. The file copied successfully.

It feels like a problem with the drives, however it's only an issue from within SQL Server.
Standard options for me to check would be the following, but this has been done by you or does not match exactly because the backup at least starts:


Disk space sufficient? (If possible do a chkdsk)
Write Access granted to SQL Server? 


Next step would be to check throughput of backup drive because SQL Server backup is sensible in this area, some timers in the background are watching. Backup to a USB-Drive / Stick is usually a very bad idea because of this.

Now for the more exotic stuff:


H:-Drive is NTFS formatted? Otherwise File size >4 GB might be an issue.
As we are dealing with a VM here: Is there some kind of disc overcommitment happening on Hyper-V or SAN level? Just because you see a e.g. 1 TB drive does not guarantee that this is covered by physical disks somewhere.
Any I/O errors in windows system event log? If something really bad is happing on I/O level you can find it there.