Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition
As part of trying to recover data from a Novell NSS partition we attempted to install Windows 7 onto a brand new disk so we could run some recovery tools. During the install at the disk selection part we got the error in the title of this post. It took me awhile to figure it out but the resolution ended up being very simple. We had 2 raid controllers plugged in that once we unplugged the system was able to create the partition. It was a bit odd since the install did not even see these disks but it worked.
Recovering data from a corrupted VMWare guest
Recently I had a client whose previous support team had set
them up with 2 servers running VMWare with one of them being duplicated to the
other using Veeam. The one thing they failed to do was limit the growth of the
VM partition to the available space of the drive so guess what happened? Yep
the VM storage drive ran out of space and corrupted the heck out of the 2 disks
attached to the only guest on it. Veeam then dutifully copied over the corrupted
data. Once they called us the machine was beyond recovery as a usable machine
(did I mention this was their DC?) even after trying several snapshots. We freed up enough space to boot the guest and got
a solid 45 minutes of check disk repair and then a notice that were was no
available AD information and a notice we needed to boot into recovery mode and restore
that data. Too bad that was gone. So now the client really just wants their
data back and a new machine built but how were we going to get into the drive
hosted on a Unix machine with multiple snapshots? It turns out this ended up being easier than expected.
There is a great bootable CD called SystemRescueCD which I was able to upload
to the storage partition on VMWare and attach it as a CD image to the corrupted
guest and boot from. Once booted you can attach the drives using the mount
command and the drive name in our case it was sdb1 so:
mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows -o ro
Once the drive is mounted you can copy the data off over the
network just like normal assuming the rescue cd was able to initialize your
network card. I would recommend the use of a program like teracopy to do the
copy rather than normal windows copy. Keep in mind this mounts the drive read
only so any tools like teracopy need to be installed on the destination
machine. You can mount the drive read/write but this is not recommended.
iTunes artwork not modifiable
So I had a user ask me the other day why in iTunes he can't change any of his artwork on his TV shows he put on his iPad. Odd question but since I have an iPad I was curious as well. I did some looking online and saw some other people asking the same question but no answers or answers like "you don't have enough rights to the file to edit it." None of the sparse answers I found were right but after some questioning I did find out that he had recently enabled the sync TV shows option under the main iPad settings/TV Shows section and then later disabled. The odd thing was every time he went and sync'd TV shows manually again it would put that check back in sync TV shows. It turned out once we put a check in "manually manage my music and videos" in the main section it stopped doing this and it enabled him to modify the artwork again.
Quickly update self signed Exchange certificates
We have several customers who use self signed certificates for their Exchange SBS servers and I wanted to share a quick easy way to update expired certificates.
First you can get a list of all certificates using Get-ExchangeCertificate
Then when you have the certificate you need to replace copy the thumbprint and issue the following command.
Get-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint <the thumbprint> | New-ExchangeCertificate
Once you are sure it is installed and working you can remove the old expired cert with
Remove-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint <the thumbprint>
This process makes it a bit easier since it retains all the information you need that already existed in the old cert.
First you can get a list of all certificates using Get-ExchangeCertificate
Then when you have the certificate you need to replace copy the thumbprint and issue the following command.
Get-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint <the thumbprint> | New-ExchangeCertificate
Once you are sure it is installed and working you can remove the old expired cert with
Remove-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint <the thumbprint>
This process makes it a bit easier since it retains all the information you need that already existed in the old cert.
Get details about user mailboxes on Exchange 2010
Ever wanted to see how much email all of your users have or how much space their deleted items is taking up? This PowerShell command will give you some nice details on all of your mailboxes on an Exchange Server. Replace exchange with your server name.
Get-MailboxStatistics -server exchange | where {$_.ObjectClass -eq "Mailbox"} | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending | ft @{label="User";expression={$_.DisplayName}},@{label="Total Size (MB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}},@{label="Items";expression={$_.ItemCount}},@{label="DeletedItems";expression={$_.deletedItemCount}},@{label="DeletedItemSize (KB)";expression={$_.totalDeletedItemSize.value.toKB()}},@{label="Storage Limit";expression={$_.StorageLimitStatus}} -auto
You will get a report like this
User Total Size (MB) Items DeletedItems DeletedItemSize (KB) Storage Limit
---- --------------- ----- ------------ -------------------- -------------
User1 10466 96237 490 2888 NoChecking
User2 6021 71813 248 5219 NoChecking
User3 4033 46138 809 7921 NoChecking
User4 3843 37157 945 4141 NoChecking
Get-MailboxStatistics -server exchange | where {$_.ObjectClass -eq "Mailbox"} | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending | ft @{label="User";expression={$_.DisplayName}},@{label="Total Size (MB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}},@{label="Items";expression={$_.ItemCount}},@{label="DeletedItems";expression={$_.deletedItemCount}},@{label="DeletedItemSize (KB)";expression={$_.totalDeletedItemSize.value.toKB()}},@{label="Storage Limit";expression={$_.StorageLimitStatus}} -auto
You will get a report like this
User Total Size (MB) Items DeletedItems DeletedItemSize (KB) Storage Limit
---- --------------- ----- ------------ -------------------- -------------
User1 10466 96237 490 2888 NoChecking
User2 6021 71813 248 5219 NoChecking
User3 4033 46138 809 7921 NoChecking
User4 3843 37157 945 4141 NoChecking
How to remove multiple contacts from a users Exchange 2010 mailbox
We recently noticed that we had a user with 516,000 contacts in his mailbox. Many of them duplicated hundreds of times. We figured out this was an issue that other people had seen when switching from one mobile device to another. Mostly it seems from a BlackBerry to an Android. For some reason this has caused some users to experience a massive replication of contacts. I did not delve much into why as this had stopped already but we needed to clean up his current contacts. He had already tried to manually do it but this was not working.
It turned out the easiest way to clean up the contacts was to have him backup 1 copy of the correct contacts and then run the following PowerShell command.
Search-Mailbox -Identity "<user name>" -SearchQuery kind:contacts -DeleteContent -TargetMailbox "<logging mailbox>" -TargetFolder "SearchAndDeleteLog" -LogLevel Full
This command will search the <user name> mailbox for all contacts and delete them. This process will be logged into the folder SeachAndDeleteLog in the account you specify in <logging mailbox>
After this completed (about 3 hours) we had him replace his saved contacts.
Search-Mailbox replaces the old Export-Mailbox with deletecontent in Exchange 2010.
More information on Search-Mailbox can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298173.aspx
You can find information on advanced querying here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
It turned out the easiest way to clean up the contacts was to have him backup 1 copy of the correct contacts and then run the following PowerShell command.
Search-Mailbox -Identity "<user name>" -SearchQuery kind:contacts -DeleteContent -TargetMailbox "<logging mailbox>" -TargetFolder "SearchAndDeleteLog" -LogLevel Full
This command will search the <user name> mailbox for all contacts and delete them. This process will be logged into the folder SeachAndDeleteLog in the account you specify in <logging mailbox>
After this completed (about 3 hours) we had him replace his saved contacts.
Search-Mailbox replaces the old Export-Mailbox with deletecontent in Exchange 2010.
More information on Search-Mailbox can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298173.aspx
You can find information on advanced querying here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Hyper-V specified node is not an owner or possible owner
Recently I added a 3rd not to our Hyper-V cluster which uses cluster shared volumes. After this I started seeing errors when trying to live migrate or backup with BackupExec some of the VM's. The error was:
"The operation failed because either the specified cluster node is not the owner of the group, or the node is not a possible owner of the group"
This error is from BackupExec but the error from live migration is almost exactly the same. Looking at the VM's they all appeared to inherit the new cluster node correctly so it was not obvious what the issue was. After a bit of digging I finally figured out the problem was with the cluster shared volumes they had not added the new node as a possible owner. The normal volumes had though. to determine if this is the problem you can run the following PowerShell command:
cluster.exe res "<cluster disk name>" /listowners
e.g. cluster.exe res "test disk" /listowners
To add owners use the following command
cluster.exe res "<cluster disk name>" /addowner:<new owner>
e.g. cluster.exe res "test disk" /addowner:node3
There is no GUI option for viewing or setting these that I have found.
"The operation failed because either the specified cluster node is not the owner of the group, or the node is not a possible owner of the group"
This error is from BackupExec but the error from live migration is almost exactly the same. Looking at the VM's they all appeared to inherit the new cluster node correctly so it was not obvious what the issue was. After a bit of digging I finally figured out the problem was with the cluster shared volumes they had not added the new node as a possible owner. The normal volumes had though. to determine if this is the problem you can run the following PowerShell command:
cluster.exe res "<cluster disk name>" /listowners
e.g. cluster.exe res "test disk" /listowners
To add owners use the following command
cluster.exe res "<cluster disk name>" /addowner:<new owner>
e.g. cluster.exe res "test disk" /addowner:node3
There is no GUI option for viewing or setting these that I have found.
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