Jesper Lönnqvist’s Blog

In order for DPM2007 to backup the system state of a Windows Server 2008 machine you have got to install Windows Backup and all of it’s subfeatures. This can easily be done using the following command:

servermanagercmd -install backup -allsubfeatures

If you don’t do this you will get an error message similar to this one:

(ID 30214 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909FB)

If you have problems installing Virtual PC Additions on a Windows Server 2008 Core, ensure that you don’t have the sound card enabled.

Otherwise the installation will fail and start a rollback. If you look in the msiexec logfile you will find a 1603 error message.

Once the sound card is deactivated the installation works as it should.

Just came across a situation where a server had been updated to Windows Server 2003 SP2 and suddenly their ADAM instance would not start anymore. After looking at it for a while I resorted to actually read the release notes for SP2, and there was the answer:

ADAM SP1 must be applied before updating a Windows Server 2003 box with SP2.

The solutions was described as:

1. Uninstall SP2
2. Install ADAM SP1
3. Reinstall SP2

It is possible to install Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 from a bootable USB drive.

To create a bootable usb drive to the following:

Start a command line utility called diskpart. This can be done directly from start/run or from a command prompt. Comments are between {}.

diskpart {This will start diskpart from a command prompt}
list disk {This will list all available disks in the system}
select disk 1 {This will select your usb disk, if it is called 1 in your system}
clean {This will erase ALL information on the currently selected disk}
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

When you are finished with diskpart, all you need to do is copy all files from your Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 installation media to the usb disk.

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

And you are done!

Windows Server 2008 has finally gone RTM. And if you’re downloading the bits from Microsoft right now it may be a good time to find out how the license activation features of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista works. Mr Kurt Roggen has written a blog post that will explain at least a couple of things for you.

Read more about it here.

Microsoft has just made SP1 for Virtual Server 2005 R2 available for download.

An updated version of the Disk Partition tool (Diskpart.exe) for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is available. This version of the Diskpart.exe tool is required to execute performance optimization as described in the “Manual Optimizations” section of OEM Guide to Windows Storage Server 2003 R2.

Source: An updated version of the Disk Partition tool for Windows Server 2003 is available

One thing that I find myself doing alot is using Virtual PC or Virtual Server to create demos and test new applications. I’m using a syspreped .vhd file in order to get a clean server up and running in just a few minutes. One thing that have bugged me with my image is that even though I’m instructed to set the local admin password during the mini-setup it wold not change it.

So what’s causing this behaviour?

According to KB200607 the password on your master image, the one that you run sysprep on, must be _blank_, now how’s that for security?!?