Problem
Trying to restore a backup of a database on a different server than the one were the backup originates generates the following error message: “The operating system returned the error ‘5(failed to retrieve text for this error. Reason: 15105)’ while attempting ‘RestoreContainer::ValidateTargetForCreation’”:
Analysis
Error 5 is as always access denied. I don’t know why text retrieval fails, but that is a problem for another day 
.Restores of backups originating from the destination server on the destination server works as expected, and the SQLServer service account have the required permissions granted on both the .bak file and the target folder. Restore of the same backup file on other servers during staging worked as expected. I thus concluded that there had to be some differences between the staging and production servers causing the issue.
- staging servers are virtual and stand-alone servers, production is a physical cluster
- staging servers use vm drives as data volumes, production has SAN disks attached to mount points
- staging has a couple of cores and > 20gigs of ram, production has 16 cores and > 200 gigs
Then it hit me, mount points are renowned for causing strange permission issues due to the fact that the permissions for the mount point and the actual volume mounted are stored separately in different ACLs:
Further investigation revealed that the service account had full control permissions on both ACLs, but the volume permissions on the data and transaction log volumes were granted via group membership, while the mount point permissions on those volumes were granted explicitly. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for other operations, but when you try to restore a database to a different destination than were it came from, the server account needs explicit permissions on the destination folder(s). That is, when original file name and Restore As are not the same.
solution
Grant the SQLServer service account explicit permissions on both the volume and the mount point. If you have different mount points for transaction log and data files, you have to do this on both folders. Furthermore, I would guess similar errors could occur if the service account lacks access to the source bak file.
