HP ML110 & Windows Server Driver woes

We've fallen out of love with Dell recently and have been using HP desktops and now servers. We have a site that needs a really small server running Windows Foundation Server 2008 so we opted for an ML110 G5, RAID1 for OS and data and a single drive to store backups, media etc.

On installing Windows Server the RAID isn't found, okay not a problem we'll load the drivers and continue are test install Windows Server 2008 32bit and all is good.
Wipe the system and start again with the WFS2008 disk which had no arrived and loaded the same drivers but no joy, you may have spotted that WFS is 64bit so we had the wrong drivers, hard to find on the HP site with opted to download from elsewhere and everything is good.

There is an article detailing the trials and tribulations of drivers for HP kit and Windows here that has links to driver downloads.

We still like Dell kit we just find them hard to deal with but we do like the kit that arrives in a box ready to go.

Vista restore woe's

Have a client with a very dead Vaio that is need of data recovery. Drive powers on but something has shorted as it’s not visible in BIOS so we need a plan B.
Vista Home backup has been running daily to another system, but not for the last few days and we want that back hence the drive has been shipped off to Ontrack and we’re left to recover what we can from backups.

So we have a temp Vista PC and an external drive with the backup files and that’s where the fun starts and our restore attempts are failing with:

The restore did not finish successfully. Error code: The backup file could not be found. Check your hardware configuration or restore from a different backup (0x8100001A).

It turns out we don’t have the required MEDIAID.BIN file and that requires a call to Microsoft CSS to sort – presumably at a cost as this is an OEM system.

All is not lost, after much googling which threw up lots of useless information and incomplete threads we found this very simple process that appears to be working as I write this entry:

1. Download sdutil.zip
2. Unzip the sdutil.zip file and rename it from sdutil.ex_ to sdutil.exe
3. Copy the sdutil.exe to the root of the drive which contains the backup files
4. Open the folder Catalogs located bellow the folder BackupSet “aaaammdd” “xxxxxx”
5. Copy the file GlobalCatalog.wbcat to the root of the drive in step 3
6. Go to Start -> Execute and type CMD.exe
7. Change to the drive with the backup directories: e.g. E:
8. At the command prompt enter: sdutil mediaid GlobalCatalog.wbcat E:
9. A new MediaID.bin is created
10. Try to restore the backup as usual using the advanced restore option and next the option restore an older backup created in this machine
11. You may want to create matching users before you start remove the security warning messages

XP Fails to boot - missing HAL.DLL

Don't panic it could be a quick and simple fix and you do have a FULL backup don't you?

Boot from your CD and follow the directions to start Recovery Console.
Then from the command prompt:
Attrib -H -R -S C:\Boot.ini
DEL C:\Boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild
Fixboot

BalckBerry Activation Fails

Added three new BlackBerry devices to a site in the last week but one of the just would not activate, having resorted to Vodafone support and got some very poor answers it was off to Google for a solution.

It turns out that this account had forwarding enabled to another mailbox on the Exchange server which is also configured as a BlackBerry user and that was the problem. The actiation email message with the ETP attachment gets forwarded to both mailboxes and BES doesn't know which one it's activating and thus activation fails. The simple workaround was to turn of forwarding and then activiation completed without further issues.

Reference: http://www.blackberryforums.com.au/forums/general-bes-discussion/945-blackberry-device-stuck-activating-retrying-during-enterprise-activation.html

Infected with a virus or malware?

We often see systems where the required internet security isn't installed or wasn't up the the latest threats leading to infections.
For our business clients we'd normally image the system back to a known good, read clean, state and join back into the network to deploy any applications and of course data is already on the server.
Where that's not an option we have good results with Malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - it just might save you the pain of a wipe and reload. Don't forget to sort some decent protection and look at a simple USB hard drive as a backup device.

Cannot connect to a remote computer RWW / RDP

Had a client with an issue that relates to a recent update to the remote desktop connection tool - it got broken and they couldn't connect back to their desktop.

You cannot connect to a remote computer or start a remote application when you use Terminal Services Web Access or Remote Web Workspace on a Windows XP SP3-based or Windows Small Business Server 2003 SP1-based computer - full details here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/951607/en-us

Or just go fix the quick fix:

1. Exit Internet Explorer
2. Click START -> RUN -> paste the following text in the Open box '%windir%\system32\regsvr32 mstscax.dll' and click OK- at the confirmation prompt, click OK.
3. Restart Internet Explorer, and try to connect to the remote computer or start the remote application.

Windows Domain Time

We had a client network where all the workstations and servers were correctly syncing time with the DC but the DC wasn't updating it's clock externally and was drifting further out of sync.

There are MS KB articles that require lots of entries in the registry (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816042) or you can run these simple commands:

w32tm /configure /manualpeerlist:time-a.nist.gov,0x1 /syncfromflags:manual /update

Net stop w32time

Net start w32time

w32tm /resync /rediscover