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Sometimes, our instructions are lacking. Today, I needed to recover my Surface Book 2 device. I thought, easy—I’ll just use the Reset PC option inside the Control Panel.
After the initial reset (using the delete my files option), Windows Explorer wouldn’t launch.… [ Continue reading ]
Tonight I found myself recovering a VM on a Windows 2008 R2 cluster connected to an MD3000i SAN. To make very long and painful story short, it appears that someone applied a series of Windows Updates and then a Dell DSM update that screwed up the multipathing.… [ Continue reading ]
After getting my PIX to boot in my previous post, I decided to run through the password recovery procedures.
When meeting with a potential customer the other day, she mentioned that she had a running PIX with an unknown password.
I thought I’d refresh my PIX skills and decided to bust out an old PIX 506E we had sitting in the office.… [ Continue reading ]
I recently found myself in the position of having to expand a virtual disk on a Dell MD3000i. The Dell MD3000i is a great entry-point SAN, but the GUI lacks some of the functions that you think would be there (such as online volume growth).… [ Continue reading ]
Dell has this great NAS device that runs Windows 2008 Storage Server Standard–the NX3000. The only problem is that Dell treats it like an “appliance,” meaning you can’t partition it the way you want. I recently ordered two with 6x1TB drives and wanted to deploy DPM to them.… [ Continue reading ]
This morning, I found myself in the unfortunate circumstance of the dreaded 0xc0190036 error. There is not a lot of information about this particular error code. It is, in fact, related to inaccessible or corrupt files.
During an update process, many files are flagged for replacement during the next system boot–that way, the system can keep running until the next convenient restart.… [ Continue reading ]
A customer approached me with a some puzzling issues. They noticed a bunch of 1053 and 1054 Userenv errors in their event logs on their virtual machines. 1053 and 1054 error messages have very similar wording:
1053 – Windows cannot determine the user or computer name.… [ Continue reading ]
Since a lot of folks (myself included) are still running a lot of Exchange 2003 in the enterprise, I though I would post a bit about setting the track alignment properly in various kinds of storage.
According to Microsoft, when creating disk partitions, the “Disk Management” MMC snap-in mis-aligns the partition with the underlying physical disk.… [ Continue reading ]
A few months ago, I ran into a problem when copying large files between two tiers of a network in one of our datacenters. I was doing a hardware upgrade on some Hyper-V hosts in a DMZ and was copying the images to a backup server while I swapped out hardware components in the Hyper-V hosts.… [ Continue reading ]