Compute engine snapshots with VSS does not work

Question

I have a Compute engine that runs windows 2016. I want to snapshot this boot-disk for backup purposes.

As far as I can see VSS (shadow copy) is prefered for data consistency. However, when I tick VSS when creating the snapshot everything seems to work fine.

However when I then create an instance from this snapshot it seems to boot up, but I cannot connect to it with RDP and nor can I create/change passwords on users through google console.

If I do a regular snapshot without VSS and then create an instance it works great, but VSS should be preferred as far as I understand.

If I in an elevated cmd do vssadmin List Volumes the volume shows up.

I did see google required a fairly new image, I don't know where to see image version I used but the machine is only a few weeks old and when I created it I took the latest version for Windows 2016.

I am not sure what I am missing here!

Update: I have a second disk attached to the same VM and if I do a snapshot of that with VSS (exactly the same way) I can then create a new disk from that snapshot, mount it to a VM. It becomes offline and readonline. I then put it online and use diskpart to remove the shadowcopy and readonly flag, but then I am struggling with removing the read-only on the structure on the disk, but at least I can read the data.

Answer 1

Windows marked the snapshot volume as snapshot and readonly. Please check document here regarding how to clear those flags if you want to remount disk created from snapshot.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/windows/creating-windows-persistent-disk-snapshot