A commonly asked question among people looking at a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 installation is “why is the WinSxS folder so big?!”   To answer that question I need to first describe componentization, and how components...

Hello, my name is Kevin Ledman. I am a Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover how to run the new Sysprep and Capture Task Sequence included with MDT 2010. If you choose to deploy an operating system manually or need...

With each new release of Windows, it's a challenge to balance keeping the OS footprint small with maintaining forward compatibility for applications and devices. The .Net Framework is at the heart of this challenge. In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to...

  Hello, my name is Manoj Sehgal. I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover “How to use Bitlocker Data Recovery Agent (DRA) to unlock Bitlocker Protected Drives In Windows 7, we have option to unlock...

Implementing highly available file servers in Windows Server 2008 is very different from how it was done in previous versions of Microsoft's clustering technology. One of the new pieces of functionality implemented in highly available file servers is...

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V , Windows Backup , Virtual Machine In order to enable VSS based backups of Hyper-V VMs using Windows Server Backup, you must add the following registry keys to register the Hyper-V VSS Writer with Windows Server Backup. Note...

The Migratedatasourcedatafromdpm.Ps1 DPM Powershell Script  is Included in Service Pack 1 of Data Protection Manager 2007. The MigrateDatasourceDataFromDPM is a command-line script that lets you migrate DPM data for individual “data source...

Hello, my name is Manoj Sehgal.   I am a Senior Support Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover How to enable Bitlocker in Windows 7 and avoid one of the most common issues we see when enabling Bitlocker using GPOs. A common problem...

“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...

Perhaps the largest call generator for the Core Team is for us to determine cause of a hard system crash that generates a Blue Screen and memory dump file.  Commonly called a "Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)."  The vast majority of these...

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...

Problem Upon startup, Windows Vista Boots to a Black Screen with only the Mouse Cursor Resolution This is most likely due to the Remote Procedure Call service (rpcss) running under the LocalSystem account rather than NT Authority\NetworkService...

  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...

Recently I helped someone on an issue where the customer had a disk that was part of a Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Cluster. They could bring the disk online, but they couldn’t write to it. During the course of troubleshooting, they ran Diskpart...

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...

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 ("W2K3" in this post) includes Windows Deployment Services ("WDS"). WDS replaces Remote Installation Services (“RIS”) on W2K3 SP1 and Windows 2000 servers. Upgrading from RIS to WDS is NOT covered here (see: Windows...

What is a Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter anyway? A question often asked is, "What is the Microsoft Cluster Virtual Adapter and what can I do with it?" The typical, and correct answer, is to leave it alone and let it just work for...

Hello, my name is Manoj Sehgal. I am a Senior Support Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover “How to backup recovery information in AD after Bitlocker is turned ON in Windows 7.” A common question we are asked is how do I save the recovery...

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...

In today’s blog I am going to explain how you can do an unattended setup of the default Windows 8 Enterprise X64 install.wim to a Surface Pro from a USB drive.   Unattended setups are not new but when you are deploying to the Surface Pro (or any...

Running sysprep Today's blog will cover a common question we get with deploying Windows. The question usually starts as "How many times can I run sysprep"? While the answer is simple it requires a more detailed explanation. When sysprep executes...

With Windows Server 2008 R2 you can perform a Bare Metal Restore of a server that has suffered a catastrophic failure.    That’s right you can restore a server without having to install the OS and then the backup agent.   You just simply...

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 Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering feature provides high availability for services and applications. To ensure applications and services remain highly available, it is imperative the cluster service running on each node in the cluster function...

Hello my name Scott McArthur and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows Platforms group. Today’s blog submission is how to use Windows Server Backup to do a complete system restore over the network. This blog is specific to Windows...