My name is Himanshu Singh and in this blog I will talk about an issue seen on Windows Server 2003 64-bit servers running File Server Resource Manager (FSRM), where, when you run a dirquota command to modify notifications using a configuration file, you...

When creating a system state backup with Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 you may encounter the following error: “One of the source volumes specified has an invalid format and cannot be protected using Windows Backup. Only volumes formatted...

Hello, My name is Himanshu and I work with the Windows Core Support Team. Recently, I worked on a patch installation issue known internally at Microsoft as a servicing issue. I thought this would be a great customer example as to how a specific error...

When creating a system state backup with Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 you may encounter the following error: “One of the source volumes specified has an invalid format and cannot be protected using Windows Backup. Only volumes formatted...

Greetings Cluster fans,   John Marlin back for another go at it.   I wanted to write something about what we have been seeing involving the use of Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and File Server resources on the same Cluster.   There have...

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...

Several months ago, I posted a blog on adding a new disk to an existing cluster. Another question we get asked a lot is “How do I replace a disk?” In this blog, I’ll walkthrough the process of replacing a 1GB disk with a 2GB disk...

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...

One question I get asked a lot working with our customers is how to failover the ‘Cluster Group’ and ‘Available Storage’ groups? Under the covers, those two groups are still just groups like any other you’d see under ‘Services and Applications’ in Failover...

Hello Cluster fans, I am back for another go at it.  This one you will need to hark back to the days of Windows 2003 Server Clusters.  Many of you still have this running and may have seen Access Denied issues with node joins, the opening of...

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...

With Failover Cluster and the quorum models used, the concept of votes is used to determine which subset of nodes survives should one group of nodes lose connectivity with another group of nodes in the same cluster. In this example, we’re using a ‘Node...

When troubleshooting boot issue such as disk or file corruption, missing files, and third party drivers, Windows provides three Windows boot-problem recovery options: Last Known Good Safe Mode Recovery Console This article is focused on the first recovery...

Customers using BitLocker Drive Encryption to protect a volume might be curious to know, how to verify BitLocker Recovery keys in SQL database for MBAM. Consider this scenario: A Volume is already BitLocker encrypted and recovery information is backed...

We wanted to do a quick write-up on an issue we’ve seen in rare circumstances with 2008 R2 clusters where a ‘Physical Disk’ resource may fail to come online with no events logged in the system event log. Issue They symptoms of this issue is that the disk...

Hello, my name is Manoj Sehgal. I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover “MBAM Setup fails with SQL TDE Error message” Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) provide a simplified administrative...

Lately I have been seeing customer issues with Windows 2008 Clustering where they are seeing both of their networks drop connections and this is causing a failover event. In the cases that I have seen, they are usually very busy SQL clusters. Windows...

Greetings Cluster fans, John Marlin here again.   In my previous blog, Rights needed for user account to create a Cluster Name Object (CNO) on Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster , I explained what rights were needed for an account in Active...

Hello, my name is Manoj Sehgal. I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover “BitLocker on Mac Book running Windows 7 Enterprise Edition” On a machine which does not have a TPM chip, we can still enable BitLocker...

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...

Hello, my name is Kaushik Ainapure. I am a Senior Support Engineer in the Windows Platforms Core group. In this blog I am going to discuss how to extract and add the KMDF (Kernel Mode Driver Framework) to a Windows Vista Deployment.   Windows...

Hello, my name is Steven Andress and I am Support Escalation Engineer (SEE) in the Platforms Support group here at Microsoft. One of the technologies I support is Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). I’d like to take a minute to provide some...

Many new computers are shipping with the option to boot Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) instead of standard BIOS.   In today’s blog I walkthrough how I installed Windows 7 SP1 X64 Enterprise on a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop that supports...

So I have been asked a few times a process of how to take a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Hyper-V Server and reconfigure it into a Windows 2008 R2 Failover Cluster with CSV’s running the Hyper-V Application.   So I decided to write this process...

In the previous blog Chuck Timon had created, he explained how to recover your Cluster Name Object (CNO) using ADRESTORE.EXE.   I wanted to add on to his blog showing how you can do this with the new Active Directory Recycle Bin available a Windows...