Problem: Right-click on an item, make a selection.  The menu disappears, mostly.  Sometimes there is a “ghost” of the selection you made and it stays on the screen on top of everything else.  Restarting your computer will fix it.  If you are using  a desktop turning off your monitor may fix it.

Permanent Solution:  Turn off the performance option “Fade out menu items after clicking”

Windows Vista/7: Control Panel–>System–>Advanced System Settings (Link)–>Advanced (Tab)–>Performance Settings(Button)–>Uncheck the option “Fade out menu items after clicking”.

Windows XP: Control Panel–>System–>Advanced(Tab)–>Performance Settings (Button)–>Uncheck the option “Fade out menu items after clicking”

This one has always been a pain to me.  When creating the original user in Outlook the profile name is “Outlook” by default.  If, at a later time, I wanted to enable multiple profiles I was always stuck with that original profile name.  This link shows how to change it to something more appropriate (like the user’s name for example).

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/how-to-rename-your-microsoft-outlook-mail-profile/2361

Like most everything I post this is a registry hack.  The standard warning applies that if you edit your registry incorrectly you can destroy your computer.  Procedure with caution!

That being said, here are the basics:

1. Registry path: HK_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Windows Messaging SubSystem\Profiles
2. Edit the string value “DefaultProfile”.  Change it to whatever you want the profile name to be (I.e. Jeff)
3. Each profile has it’s own Key under the Profile key.  Rename the profile key to match the name entered above.
4. Note: If the profile you are changing is not the default key you can skip step 2.  If it IS the default profile however, make sure you DON’T skip step #2.

This registry hack will prevent the 3AM restart of your computer after Windows Automatic Updates completes it’s work.

It is important to note that a RESTART IS STILL REQUIRED BEFORE THE UPDATES TAKE EFFECT.  Meaning if you set this flag and never restart your computer you might as well leave Automatic Updates turned off.

Edit the following Registry Key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers

Set the value to: 1

Coderetard.com is where I found the information originally and they have a more in-depth article than I cover here.  Check it out!

WARNING: Editing your registry can cause permanent damage to your computer.  Proceed with caution.

If you’ve ever used Remote Desktop to connect to a Dell Server with Windows 2003 you probably been greeted by an enormous background photo of a Dell server that often paints line-by-line on slower connections.  This is something that always bugged me but, until now, I never looked into how to get rid of the annoying image.

A search turned up this article by Dave Hodgson

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Remove-Dell-Wallpaper-From-A-Windows-2003-R2-Server&id=1192410

The quick-and-dirty: Nuke the entry in HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Desktop/Wallpaper

PCI Database

• When your stuck with an “Unknown Device” in Device Manager, use this database to find out make/model of the device.
• Visit Site

Forensics Wiki (Added 5/11/2011)

• Fascinating site that get’s into the nitty-gritty of data recovery (among other things).
• Visit Site

99Designs (Added 5/19/2011)

• Create Logo & Design competitions
• Visit Site

It’s been a long, long time since my days at Dice Software.   At that time, I could really get around a unix box at that time — but now?  Not so much.

Today, I occasionally work on Linux boxes and some of the commands I should know but can’t seem to remember are listed below…

• chmod +x [FileName]  (Make a file executable)
• ps -A   (Show all processes) – Added 5/25/2011
• grep “xx”  (Use to filter results.  i.e. ps -A | grep “dd” shows only dd jobs running) – Added 5/25/2011
• rm -rf [Folder Name] (Deletes a folder, including all sub-folders and files WITHOUT ASKING) – Added 8/25/2011

I, like everyone, thought when I setup this blog that I would be using it everyone sharing awesome knowledge with the world.  Looking at my post history all I can say is….yeah.

Which leads to the article title.  I might as well use this so I can find things later when I need them.  Who knows, maybe someone else can get something out of it.  Of course I’ll never know because 12 billion spam bots try to post in the comments.  If anyone ever tried to post something and never saw it sorry about that!

The subject today is corrupt registries.  I’ve used this article probably 10 times in the last couple of months.  It comes in really handy when a computer won’t start.   It’s complicated to look at but pretty easy to execute.  Check it out if you have a computer that won’t start.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

I’ve had a couple of customers over the last couple of months tell me that Windows is complaining that the automatic updates are not being installed.  When I looked into it on both computers I found that all Office updates were failing with an error code 646.

KB Article ID: 2258121 – Error code “0×80070646,” “646,” or “1606″ when you try to install Office updates

The page has instructions on how to fix the problem or a “Fix it for me” button.  The long and short of it is this:

Most of my customers are small businesses that I visit on a regular basis.  For some that means once or twice a week, for other’s monthly visits are sufficient.  One of the key areas I focus on when checking a site is the backup. 

Microsoft’s backup utility, NTBackup, is a tool I use at many of my customers.  Although I wasn’t a fan when tapes were the primary backup media, now that we’ve moved to Hard Drive backups, I really like it.  It’s aware of Exchange & SQL Server, will record System State, including Active Directory and you can select as little or as much data as you want.  Best of all it’s free!  If your servers are NT, 2000 or 2003 it’s built right in.  I was disappointed to find that it is not included, nor supported, for Windows 2008 (as I’ve previously posted about).

One tiny complaint I do have with the software is the limited number of logs that are saved.  By default it’s 10.  If you are checking the backup every day, or even once a week, this is fine.  You can see what happened each day.  If you don’t check the backup logs that often or, as in my case, are not at the location, you could miss potential problems.

Fortunately there is a simple registry hack that will let you decide the number of logs the program saves.  Using Regedit, navigate to and change the following registry entry:

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Ntbackup\Log Files\Log File Count

Set the number to whatever you like just remember to switch to DECIMAL, unless you are a wiz at converting hex numbers in your head!

• Essential Overview Service – IT Administration for small businesses
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Until recently 0.0% of my customers had upgrade their servers to Windows 2008.  Last month was my first experience installing it or working with it for more than a few minutes.  The OS overall seems solid but left me extremely disappointed in the System Backup.

I haven’t spent enough time with the system to give a fully qualified review but I can say that I struggled just getting the system to do a backup of the C drive.  Although I expect you’ll hear more from me about this system (hopefully about how wrong I was), for now I’ll just run through the problems we had.  Hopefully it will help someone else in the future.

Background:

• This customer had 2003 SBS that they had been running for years.  Recently the hardware became a little flaky so we decided it was time to upgrade.  They spent a few bucks and ordered a very nice server with 2008 SBS on it.
• When the server arrived we followed Microsoft’s instructions on migrating from 2003 to 2008. Things went pretty smoothly.  Backups and restores took the most time.
• We decided that the old server, despite its quirks, still had some value so we put new hard drives in it and loaded it with 2003 standard edition as each domain can only have 1 SBS server on it.
• The old hard drive from the original server were placed in a USB drive case and mounted on the new server.  We surmised that it would nice to have the drives handy, just in case we missed any data.

Problem:

A few days after the installation we were attempting to configure the backup system.  The thing that was immediately apparent was no Exchange backup, no SQL Server backup; it was a full system backup or nothing.  I’ve read that Microsoft plans to add an Exchange module to the system, but as far as I can tell it’s not out yet.  I’ve also seen a few posts where people were speculating that the MS engineers were simply saying that the fix was coming.   This could just be typical Microsoft bashing so I’m not sure who to believe.

I digress…After we saw that we needed to change our backup strategy, we decided to start with a backup of the C drive.

Configuring the backup wasn’t difficult; we just used the wizard in the SBS Console.  Running the backup proved more challenging.  We immediately received an error in the Backup History that said “Server Backup did not finish successfully. See the Event Log for details. “

Road to a solution:

Ok great.  Not very helpful but what can you do?  A Google search for “Event 521 Backup” (See Image 1) led me to this Microsoft page.  The article basically says “Check for other event failures with a source of either VSS or SPP”. 

Oh boy, another clue!  We found errors in the Application event log for source SPP (Event ID #16387 – See Image 2) that happened at the same time the backups were run.  Eventid.net pointed to this MS article. 

This wild goose of an article indicates that the problem is caused by “an active EISA partition on the computer is a hidden partition”.  Although this computer had an EISA partition, it was not active so this turned out not to be the problem.  Further investigation of the error messages showed slight differences in the error message (although the Event ID was the same). 

In the article referenced above the message was “Description: Shadow copy creation failed because of error reported by ASR Writer. More info: Incorrect function.” The message that we were receiving was “More info: The backup failed due to a missing disk for a dynamic volume. Please ensure the disk is online and retry the backup.”

Finally, with mild-to-severe aggravation motivating me, I ran a Google search on that phrase.  After 2 or 3 of the results I found this article and about half-way through the author mentions that he had a broken mirror that caused the problem…

Light bulb!

The USB drive that I had installed on the new server also had a failed mirror.   One of the reasons we changed servers was that very reason. Image 3 shows the Disk Manager while we were having problems. 

At the time I was working on this problem I was off-site so I wasn’t able to physically remove the drive but I did take it ‘offline’ via the Disk Management tool.  Once that was done (See Image 4) the backup worked fine — even though the failed mirror had nothing to do with either the source or destination of the backup. 

Although I didn’t test this, I’m sure removing the USB drive from the system or removing the mirror would also solve the problem.

Whew! Glad that’s over. Now onto finding an Exchange backup…

Overview:

• Windows 2008 SBS System backups were failing.
• Event Log showed the following errors:
  • Event ID # 521
    • Source: Backup
    • Description: Backup started at ‘<date> <time>’ failed as Volume Shadow copy operation failed for backup volumes with following error code ‘<error code>’. Please rerun backup once issue is resolved.
    • Event ID #16387
      • Source: SPP
      • Description: More info: The backup failed due to a missing disk for a dynamic volume. Please ensure the disk is online and retry the backup.”
• Cause of failure:
  • A failed mirror on an old drive listed in Disk Manager

Windows 2008 Backup – Chasing a solution