Recently, Microsoft Support released an update for Windows Server 2003 SP2 that allows Chkdsk.exe tool compact the NTFS security descriptor stream (a.k.a. $secure file). Depending on the file system usage, this descriptor can consume a lot of disk...

The Storage Solutions Division Test Team is looking for several new Software Design Engineers in Test (SDET). Interested? Visit http://members.microsoft.com/careers/default.mspx and search for Job Codes 202273 , 206181 , 207061 , 208832 , 210633 ,...

SQL Server 2008 introduces new options to store unstructured data, in addition to the current BLOB support in SQL Server 2005. In this post, I examine two previously existing options (IMAGE, VARBINARY(MAX)) and describe two new ones (VARBINARY(MAX...

Some customers ask why parallel SCSI support was removed from Windows Server 2008. Failover Cluster in Windows Server 2008 intents to achieve the highest standard of reliability. For that, every hardware component has to be marked as “certified...

The previous article in this series explained how to migrate replication of the SYSVOL share to the ‘REDIRECTED’ state. In this article, we examine how to complete migration of all domain controllers to the ‘ELIMINATED’ state. Before we begin …...

The previous article in this series explained how to migrate replication of the SYSVOL share to the ‘PREPARED’ state. In this article, we examine how to migrate all domain controllers to the ‘REDIRECTED’ state. Before we begin … Before migrating...

In a previous blog post, I covered the different ways you can expose storage to a Hyper-V guest. After getting some feedback, this new blog posts provides additional details on two frequent comments: • How to can boot a Hyper-V guest from an...

This is an update to the solutions table posted previously on this blog. Vista Backup team has been working with customers to troubleshoot common problems, but sometimes it’s a hard job – some error codes belong to other system components...

Vista SP1 Backup & Restore contains many updates that improve reliability. Great effort has been put into improving the overall quality of File Backup, Complete PC Backup and System Restore. Many of those important changes may not be visible to...

This is a summary of recent revisions to the VSS documentation on MSDN. 1. In “Definition of Components by Writers” ( http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa381594.aspx ),the “Adding Files to a Component” section has been expanded to include...

Previous articles in this series contained an introduction to the SYSVOL migration procedure and explained how the Dfsrmig.exe tool can be used for SYSVOL migration. Keeping this background information in mind, we’re now ready to start the actual SYSVOL...

For Server 2008 the VSS team invested a great deal in hardware shadow copy scenarios which you can read about here . Additionally significant work went into enhancing the APIs for writers and widening their adoption by other applications and components...