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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...

Hello everyone. Today’s post is going to cover the steps needed to follow should you ever have to remove a ‘Physical Disk’ resource from a clustered service or application where that disk is configured as a mount point. Removing a disk from a group may be needed if the application no...

Welcome to the AskCore blog. Today, we are going to talk about nodes being removed from active Failover Cluster membership randomly. If you are having problems with a node being removed from membership, you are seeing events like this logged in your System Event Log: This event will be logged on...

In a previous blog, Understanding the Cluster Debug Log in 2008 , you were given the information on how Cluster logging in Windows 2008 Failover Clustering and beyond has changed from the earlier versions. In this blog, you were shown how the size of the log can be manipulated in order to keep a recommended...

How VSS Tracing Works! Where to start? Well this depends on your current level of knowledge on the topic. So let’s start with a basic understanding of what VSS is. If you are just starting to work with VSS I suggest reading the articles below. The key points to focus on in this article are...

Today, I am going to discuss how to troubleshoot a scenario where the system does not boot in normal mode; however, boots up fine upon selecting F8 -> Disable Driver Signature Enforcement. In 64-bit operating systems starting with Windows Vista, Windows will load a kernel-mode driver only if the...

Often we have seen operating system hanging at Splash screen as seen in the screenshot below. For Windows Server 2003: For Windows Server 2008 and above: As the first troubleshooting step, you would like to boot into safemode and you would notice operating system hangs at acpitabl.dat. See image below...

In this blog we are going to discuss about how we can decode and fix operating system crashes with Stop c000021a. Below is the first screen you will see after POST, followed by the bugcheck information. Here is the detail bugcheck information: The session manager initialization system process...

Cluster Shared Volumes is a new feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering intended to enhance the capabilities of Highly Available Virtual Machines. It is recommended to utilize Cluster Shared Volumes if you intend to use the Live Migration feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. In this...

We have updated the KB that deals with this error to include a new script to get users out of the 0xc0000034 condition and allows SP1 to install properly. This fix will only work for users who are currently in a 0xc0000034 state after applying Service Pack 1 for Windows 7. This script is NOT for use...

  Cluster shared Volumes (CSV) is a new feature implemented in Windows Server 2008 R2 to assist with new scale-up\out scenarios.   CSV provides a scalable fault tolerant solution for clustered applications that require NTFS file system access from anywhere in the cluster.   In Windows...

Today’s blog posting is based on documentation written for our activation specialists to answer some of the most common questions for customers that are new to our current activation technologies.   Depending on the size of your organization and your familiarity with our current technologies, activation...

Quite a while back I wrote a blog on a new functionality in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters called ‘file share scoping’ ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2009/01/09/file-share-scoping-in-windows-server-2008-failover-clusters.aspx ). I was informed recently that our Networking Support...

I know what you are thinking, “How hard can it be to work with cluster file shares?”. I would be willing to bet a lot of you have been working with File Server clusters since NT 4.0 days. If you are still working with them today in Windows Server 2008 R2, you know things have changed. In this blog, I...

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...

  I am here today to discuss the troubleshooting switches used to start a Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 Failover Cluster. From time to time, the Failover Cluster Service will not start on its own. You need to start it with a diagnostic switch for troubleshooting purposes and/or to get it back to production...

As discussed in previous blogs and articles, there is no longer a Cluster Service account in Failover Clustering. However, there are still some rights needed in Active Directory. The rights of the logged on user and the Cluster Name Object are part of these rights. This blog is only going to cover the...

The purpose of this article is to explain a troubleshooting methodology with Hyper-V that goes a little deeper than the Event Logs.  I’m creating a simple problem, starting a Virtual Machine with a corrupt .vhd file, to show how to proceed. I’m simply starting my VM, z2008_VS1 from the Hyper-V Manager...

The Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering: Networking   three-part blog series has been out for a little while now.   Hopefully, it has been helpful.   Little did I know there would be an opportunity to write another part.   This segment will be short as it covers a very specific...

One of the major changes from 2003 to 2008 is the way we handle logging of cluster debug events. I thought I’d do a quick write-up on how cluster debug logging works in 2008. In Windows 2003 Failover Clustering, the cluster service on each node constantly writes to a live debug output file. These files...

Greetings CORE blog fans!   It has been awhile so I thought it was time for another blog.   In recent weeks, we have seen an issue where the Windows Server 2008 R2 storage validation test List All Disks is failing with a Status 87.   Figure 1, is an example of what is displayed in the...

Hello, my name is Kaushik Ainapure. I am a Support Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog I am going to discuss an issue with BitLocker drive preparation tool. When you try to run the BitLocker Preparation tool you may encounter the following error message: The new active drive cannot be formatted...

While working with customers, I have frequently run into situations where they need help with Hyper-V snapshots. Help with understanding what snapshots are, how to use them, best practices with them, or, in worst case scenarios, they may need help in recovering them in order to use a VM. What I’d like...

Today’s blog will cover scenario where you would like to customize the Start menu and TaskBar(also called SuperBar) as part of your deployment. In Windows 7 the start menu looks like this The top 5 icons in the start menu are not customizable. Note that over time these icons will be replaced by the users...

In Part 2 , I discussed implementing networks in a Failover Cluster.   In this final segment, I will discuss troubleshooting cluster networking issues. Troubleshooting cluster networking issues As previously stated, it is important that redundant and reliable cluster communications connectivity...