Today at work I was testing the installation of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 using the SCCM Software Updates Installation components. The installation of the update failed on my test machine and when looking at the SCCM log files it appeared that the installation failed with an exit code -2147023293 and 0×80070643 which basically indicated a fatal error during installation. As these error codes were to generic, I had to look deeper to find the exact cause of the installation failure.
The next step was to have a look into the CBS.log file (c:\windows\logs\cbs\cbs.log) and there I found the following entries listed:
2011-03-17 10:14:44, Info CBS SPI: Reporting AC required event
2011-03-17 10:14:44, Error CBS SPI: (PerformSPInstallation:809)Machine running on battery power hr=0x800f0829
2011-03-17 10:14:44, Error CBS SPI: (wmain:1105)Failed to perform SP installation hr=0x800f0829
2011-03-17 10:14:44, Info CBS SPI: Reporting Failed event
2011-03-17 10:14:44, Info CBS SPI: SPInstall terminating, return code 0x800f0829
This clearly indicated that it is a prerequisite that your system should not be running on battery power when installing the service pack.
And indeed, after connecting my machine to an electrical outlet the service pack installation succeeded.
As I needed more memory for the Hyper-V environment at home I first had to find out how many memory slots were in use and what the capacity was of each memory module. Apart from opening up the computer case and taking out each memory module, you could easily query for this information using Powershell.
[PS] C:\> Get-WmiObject CIM_PhysicalMemory | ft BankLabel, Capacity, Speed -Autosize
By using this Powershell command you will get a list of the memory modules installed with their physical bank location, size and speed.
After implementing SCCM 2007 R2 I wanted to configure my standard domain account (which has no domain admin rights) with the privileges to be able to read all SCCM reports.
To make this work I had to:
- give my domain account ‘read’ rights on ‘All Instances’ of the ‘Report’ class
- give my domain account ‘read’ rights on ‘All Instances’ of the ‘Status Messages’ class
(otherwise I could not see any of the status message reports but got a “RecordID can not be found” error message) - add my domain account to the ‘SMS Reporting Users’ local group on the server which had the Reporting Point Site System Role installed
(otherwise I could not see the reports tree but instead got an Internal Server Error message)
Remove mailboxes for disabled users
Today I had to export the user mailboxes for all users who were disabled in Active Directory.
I used the following Powershell commands to make this happen.
The first step is to get a list of the mailboxes for all disabled users in Active Directory
[PS] C:\> $mailboxlist = Get-Mailbox -Server yourservername | ? {$_.UserAccountControl -match “AccountDisabled” -and $_.isLinked -match “false” -and $_.isResource -match “false”}
The next step is to add the necessary permissions to the mailbox to be able to export it and afterwards export it to a specified directory
[PS] C:\> foreach ($mailbox in $mailboxlist) {
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity $mailbox -AccessRights fullaccess -User yourusername
Export-Mailbox -Identity $mailbox -PSTFolderPath c:\temp\ -Confirm:$false
}
Note that you can only run the Export-Mailbox command on a 32-bit computer with the Outlook client installed.
Boost iMac boot time
I bought myself one of those cool and fancy iMac 27″ machines last year in November and only today I found out why it was rather slow to boot up to the login screen.
It seems that by default the iMac is trying to boot from the network and will only boot from the local disk once the boot from network times out.
If you want to change this behaviour, you need to select your local hard disk as startup disk in ‘System Preferences/Startup Disk’.
After making this change on my iMac, the boot time went from around 50 seconds to 30 seconds!
If only I had known this a couple of months earlier …
As you might know already Windows 7 includes built-in troubleshooting packs to deal with common problems such as problems that are related to networking, search, performance and others which you’ll find in this blog post.
These troubleshooting packs can either be started by the user himself (e.g. via the topics in Help, the Windows 7 Action Center or the Troubleshooting Control Panel) or the system can launch them automatically for some applications or Windows components and try to point out what is causing the misbehavior.
Another option is to use Windows Powershell V2 together with the TroubleshootingPack module which I will explain to you in this post.
Before we can use the troubleshooting pack features, we need to import the module:
PS C:\> Import-Module TroubleshootingPack
Now that the module is imported, we can look for any commands related to the troubleshooting packs:
PS C:\> Get-Command -Module TroubleshootingPack | Select-Object Name
Name
——-
Get-TroubleshootingPack
Invoke-TroubleshootingPack
Before we can use the Get-TroubleshootingPack command, we need to find out which troubleshooting packs are available as the command requires that you specify the location of the specific pack you want to use. read more…
Next week I will be joining the Microsoft Techdays in Antwerp and as a reference for myself I’m posting a list of the sessions I’ll be attending:
Tuesday March 30th:
- Managing Exchange 2010
- Exchange High Availability
- Exchange Information Protection & Control (including RBAC)
- Exchange 2010 Client Side: What’s new talking about Client Access?
- Exchange Performance / Scalability
Wednesday March 31st:
- Managing Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with Windows Powershell V2
- What’s Windows Server 2008 R2 going to do for your Active Directory?
- A-Z of Usable Security in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7
- Deploy Windows 7 Using Microsoft’s FREE Deployment Tools
- Eliminating Login Scripts using Group Policy Preferences
Thursday April 1st:
- Windows Deployment Made Easier: Meet WAIK 2.0 and Volume Activation 2.0
- DirectAccess Technical Drilldown, Part 1 of 2: IPV6 and Transition Technologies
- DirectAccess Technical Drilldown, Part 2 of 2: Putting it all together
- Introduction to Microsoft Communications Server “W14″
- Windows Crash Dump Analysis
- Notes from the field implementing Windows 7 in the Enterprise
Recently I discovered a bug when using the SharePoint local drafts folder functionality. This local drafts folder functionality allows you to edit checked out files while being disconnected from the network and check in the changes once you are connected to the network again … at least that’s what I expected.
It seems that when you open the file from your local drafts folder while being disconnected from the network, make changes and save it again, the link to the SharePoint document library is removed. When you try to check in the file from within a Microsoft Office application, you receive the following error message:
and when you try to check in the file in the SharePoint Document library, you receive the following error message:
The following steps where taken to reproduce the issue:
- Create an Excel file (DraftsTest.xlsx), add some content and save it locally on disk
- Upload the Excel file to a SharePoint document library with versioning enabled
- Check out the file and save to the local drafts folder
- Disconnect from the network
- Open the Excel file from the local drafts folder, make changes and save it again
- Connect to the network
- Open the Excel file from the local drafts folder and notice that the links to the SharePoint document library are gone
- Try to check in the file from within the SharePoint document library
As some people within the company really wanted this feature to be working, I logged a call with Microsoft Support.
A few phone calls later the conclusion was that this was a known issue and that there were no plans to fix this issue in the current version of MOSS but that this feature ‘might’ be working in MOSS 2010.
We’ll see …
Yesterday I reinstalled my laptop with Windows 7 64-bit as it was still running the Windows 7 release candidate which will, on purpose, be acting strange from February 15th onwards (http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=7091).
I noticed however that after enabling bitlocker on my system drive my laptop was not shutting down properly anymore. After having shut down windows, the screen turned black and the laptop stopped responding while still being powered on.
After a quick search on Google it seemed that it wasn’t just my laptop having this problem and that this was a known issue for which a hotfix was available from Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975496). Indeed the problem was solved by installing this hotfix.
The only question that remains is although this hotfix has been there since November last year, it is still not being delivered via Windows Update.
Windows 7 – Problem Steps Recorder
The Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) is one of the cool, but hidden, features of Windows 7. If you ever had to offer technical support to a computer user, you probably know how hard it can be for them to describe the problem clearly. The Problem Steps Recorder is the tool that will save you from wasting your precious time as it allows the user to record the steps to reproduce the problem.
What the tool actually does is taking a screenshot after any mouse click or key stroke, add some technical information and wrap it all up in a zipped MTHML report page. This report page can afterwards be shared with the person performing the technical support who can either view the report as is, or as a slideshow.
Here you can find an example report in which I try to save a read-only file.
To start the Problem Steps Recorder, type and select “psr.exe” or “Problem Steps Recorder” in the Windows 7 start menu.