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Welcome back to the CORE Team Blog. Paul Reynolds here. I would like to let everyone know about changes on how to capture Storport traces in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. NOTE: The information below is based on having hotfix KB2819476 installed (part of the April 2013 cumulative update for Windows...

Greetings AskCore fans. I thought I would start creating a blog for a subset of the videos/sessions available at each of the conferences that Microsoft has throughout the year. These sessions will be available and will deal with topics that are discussed here on the AskCore Blog. There are numerous other...

This blog has been a long time coming. There is a bit of confusion about the subject of alternate data streams (ADS) and no small amount of suspicion. So I want to take a few minutes to set the record straight on ADS. A couple years ago I wrote a blog on NTFS attributes. http://blogs.technet.com...

  While working on Windows 8/Windows Server 2012, I have been tied up with other content creation projects and as such have not had time to write for AskCore. However, I’ve had a number of blog ideas rattling around in my head. Today I finally found some time to get one of them committed to paper...

Welcome back to the CORE Team Blog. Paul Reynolds here. I would like to let everyone know about changes on how to capture Storport traces in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. Previously, Bob Golding wrote a blog on how to do this in Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2. If you have Windows 2008 or 2008...

The process to compact a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk (vhd) in Windows Server 2012 has changed slightly from previous versions of Windows. It is still recommended that you defrag the drive in advance. Also be aware, if the virtual hard disk is not NTFS formatted, you must prepare the virtual...

My name is William Effinger, and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core team at Microsoft. Some of the most common questions we get here at the storage team center around CHKDSK. If you have ever come across any event ID 55s in your system event log, this blog is for you. What...

My name is Flavio Muratore and I am a Sr. Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core team at Microsoft. If you ever find yourself analyzing storage performance with Performance Monitor, this post is for you. We will go beyond very brief descriptions provided in Perfmon and describe how we calculate...

My name is Flavio Muratore and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core Team. One subject we haven’t written much about in the Core team blog is “disk performance”. Today I would like to talk a little bit about measuring Physical Disk IO Latency with Windows Performance Monitor...

Disk alignment, partition alignment, offset alignment…whatever you like to call it, it was very important back in the Windows 2000/2003 days.   Different storage configurations could make use of the Windows ability to align its volumes to predetermined sectors.   The benefit was increased disk...

I have worked a few customer cases lately that have had the same issue.   Explorer shows that a disk has plenty of disk space available.   When you look at the same disk in Disk Management, you see that it is almost full.   One thing that can cause this is leftover shadow copies.  ...

Its Robert Mitchell again and I’m back to talk about my favorite subject, storage.   I’ve had a number of people ask me about how GPT disks are used in conjunction with Windows Failover Cluster.   So I wanted to take a few minutes to clear up any misconceptions there might be on how this works...

Today’s blog is going to cover an issue we have seen a couple of times now with customers utilizing Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to Deploy Windows although it can happen with any deployment tool out there. Issue: During deployment of Windows or even after Windows is deployed you see an Open File...

GUID Partition Table or GPT is a standard that’s been around for a while but is still not completely understood by the masses.  So I wanted to do a quick blog to address some of the common questions we  hear from day to day. Previously in my blog entitled Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows...

It is time once again to delve into the fascinating world of NTFS! So far I’ve outlined how files become more complex as they grow, the different metafiles found in the MFT, and then the different parts of Windows storage that results in the infamous 2TB size limitation. Today I want to list out most...

Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 has a validation test that needs to be run against all nodes confirm that your hardware and settings are compatible with Failover Clustering. For the purpose of this blog, I am not going to go into all the tests and what they do. For more information on Cluster Validation...

“Why can’t I have a drive bigger than 2 TB?” This is a common question.   And as storage has gotten bigger and cheaper, I see it more and more.   So let’s take a few minutes to talk about the mysterious 2 TB limit. There are actually three different 2 TB limitations that are commonly hit.....

They sit there, hiding in the root directory… metafiles .   The shell hides them from the user, but they are still there…lurking.   Microsoft does a pretty good job hiding these files so you don’t accidentally damage them.   But what are these files and how does NTFS use them? Before we...

In my quest to better understand the interworking of how NTFS stores information on disk, I have been researching what happens to a file as it grows in size and complexity.   The reason I’m after this knowledge is so I can better troubleshoot certain storage issues.   Recently, I realized that...

In prior versions of Windows Server Cluster (NT, 2000, 2003), adding a new disk to an existing cluster was often a cumbersome process. Sometimes the OS would not recognize the new disk. Sometimes the Cluster would not be able to add a new disk resource. Sometimes it took a reboot of the OS to detect...

A question the CORE Team gets asked frequently deals with configuring Hyper-V Guest storage using Volume GUIDs instead of drive letters. In this blog I will cover this topic. Volume GUID Storage Storage in a Hyper-V Guest can be referenced by way of a Volume Globally Unique Identified (GUID). This is...

A question the CORE Team gets asked frequently deals with configuring Hyper-V Guest with Pass-through disks. In this blog I will cover this topic. Pass -through Disk Configuration Hyper-V allows virtual machines to access storage mapped directly to the Hyper-V server without requiring the volume be configured...