Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : Server 2008 R2

Ooops, that’s not right…

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:51:06 GMT

I have been asked twice this week if this is possible and if so how to do it, so I guess either the information is not readily available on the Internet, or the two people who asked me just couldn’t be bothered to look it up...!

I’m sure you’ve seen the below screen appear during the first boot of your computer or server after you have installed any updates in Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s the screen that says “Completing stage X of Y”.

It is during this phase that, amongst other tasks, any files that were in use while the update was being applied are now copied into their right place and updated once the computer was rebooted. On very rare occasions you might one day see that the computer has gotten stuck at the above screen, and the configuring of the update(s) never completes. This creates a dilemma because you want to get access to the console so that you can work out what went wrong, but this will require a hard reset of the computer. However, on the screen in clear text it is telling you not to turn off your computer.

This issue might occur for several different reasons, which are way outside my field of expertise so I won’t try to explain them here. Thankfully, there is a solution for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that permits you to rollback the changes made by all the updates you applied during the last update. Simply use the below steps to recover your non-booting system:

Boot the computer into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) by either using the installation media or pressing F8 during boot (WinRE is built in to OS installations now).
Open a command prompt.
Navigate to the \Windows folder that you wish to repair.
Run the command: DISM /image:DRIVE LETTER OF WINDOWS DRIVE\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

An example of this command might be: DISM /image:C:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

A message should then appear saying

Reverting pending actions from the image....

The operation completed. Any revert of pending actions will be attempted after reboot.”

When you restart the computer you will now see a different screen, this time saying "Reverting pending actions". Once this process has completed, any changes that the previous update(s) made should now be reversed and you should be able to log on correctly.

IKEA-fying my computer

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:50:00 GMT

I have had this blog post in the pipeline for a while now, but I have been waiting until all the pieces fell into place, to make it something actually worthwhile to read! Be warned though, this is a rather long blog post – but please stay awake!

Having access to earlier builds of Microsoft operating systems is great (and pretty important for my job given that I specialise in deploying them!) as I get to play with new technologies long before everyone else :-). The only downside to this though is that, seeing as I only have one company laptop, it means that every few months I am constantly formatting and reinstalling my computer. This is a task that everyone knows is painful; no matter how great the setup process of Microsoft Windows and then all the applications, it is still a couple of days work afterwards getting everything just right. Also, it is not as simple as just reinstalling Windows and applications as I always had to realise the following process:

Back up user data
Back up Outlook PST files
Back up Internet Favourites
Export all certificates for my user account
Export Bitlocker recovery keys
Burn DVD with latest version of Microsoft Windows
Format hard drive
Install operating system
Join computer to domain
Install all patches
Activate license for Windows
Install all applications, i.e. Office, FOXIT PDF, Anti-Virus, Visual Studio, Visio etc. etc.
Install more patches
Move user data, favourites, Outlook files, certificates and everything else back to internal laptop hard drive
Activate Bitlocker on hard drive (and re-encrypt C: partition)

It is such a tedious task that it would often put me off of changing the OS, particularly if I was away from the office travelling or did not have the time to do all of the above at home. And, after I had a Homer Simpson moment, I became paranoid that my backups were safe, so sometimes I made two copies of everything! What I wanted/needed was something a bit more ‘IKEA’-like; something modular that would allow me to swap pieces in and out easily without affecting the rest...

One day, on the way home from Barcelona on the train (trains are incredible in Spain by the way. From Madrid to Barcelona at 300 km/h without even noticing it) when I realised that, with a new feature in Windows 7 this was now possible! I have now been playing around the idea for a while and I wanted to blog about it, not so much that someone else might follow the steps (because it is far from painless at the moment, improving though) but because it shows the potential of what can be done right now with Windows 7 and existing software, and it might also be a common configuration one day in the future, who knows?

With Windows 7 a computer can boot using an operating system that is installed inside a VHD file, but the operating system is using the physical hardware of the computer – this feature is called “Boot from VHD” and has nothing to do with virtualisation apart from that it uses the VHD disk file format. What this means is that you can prepare a Windows 7 virtual machine in Hyper-V, execute sysprep and then copy the VHD file to a different computer and configure it to boot. The operating system inside the VHD file runs using all the physical hardware of the computer, but all operating system data remains inside the VHD file (think: container file, nothing more). Now, if my operating system is all contained inside a single file on the disk, here is the first step to making it modular; to change the operating system, I just need to copy a new VHD file to my hard drive and delete the unwanted VHD file or make it dual-boot.

This leaves me then with the problem of having to back up all user data before changing the operating system, and then restoring the data afterwards. But what if I configured Live Mesh to maintain a copy of my data in the cloud? By doing this, all I have to do is change the operating system, install the Live Mesh client agent and then sit back while all my user data reappears on my computer from the cloud. I won’t have had to make any backups, nor recover any files. My data is pulled down automatically from the online backup that Live Mesh maintains for me automatically and I can eliminate this pain from the process as well.

Now then, what about the reinstalling all of the applications every time? This is an easy one: if I package all of my applications into App-V “bubbles”, then I no longer need to reinstall any applications at all, all I do is just launch the application inside it’s bubble and I am up and running – no more application reinstalls and no need to worry about compatibility issues with a new operating system

In figure 1, I have represented the idea with a diagram. Every piece of the problem is contained inside it’s own module and can be swapped out easily, without affecting any other module – I can even change the underlying hardware, i.e. move to a new physical computer, with minimal effort now :-)

Figure 1: Welcome to the Oxley-verse

In figure 2 I show my drive partition schema, so that you can see that I have no operating system actually installed, it is all inside a VHD file (note the blue colour for icon on disk 1). Disk 0 has 2 partitions, excluding the initial RAW partition, the first (the D: drive) is the partition that holds the VHD file. It is not a bootable partition, and contains only a single file, the VHD file. In the M: drive partition on disk 0 I have all of my user data, application files, etc. This is important as, in order for this to work, the VHD must only contain the operating system and nothing else.

Disk 1 is the VHD file that is mounted at boot time, containing only my Windows 7 install.

Figure 2: Drive schema

Finally, by redirecting my entire user profile to the M: drive, I am not using the C: for anything other than the operating system. All of the user data, such as Favourites, documents, even temp files, etc. are redirected to M:. I have it all working great now, but it took an awful lot of work to get there. However, now that it is done, I can change my operating system (simply swapping out the VHD, fixing a few registry keys etc.) and be working with everything again within a couple of hours, as opposed to a couple of days. Beat that for efficiency!

Lessons learned:

As with all experimenting I learnt plenty of lessons, the hard way. Also, it is not totally modular yet, as certain pieces can’t be abstracted from the operating system; an example of this is the anti-virus software that still needs to be installed inside the VHD file and certain applications insist on writing to C:\Users\USERNAME. Below, I have listed the biggest problems that I came experienced, as well as some issues that need to be considered. The biggest issue I have seen though is not actually a technical one; some of the configurations are very very very likely to be unsupported by Microsoft and/or third party vendors. This doesn’t concern me too much because I am my own helpdesk, but it may be an issue in different environments.

Microsoft company policy states that any disk partition that contains confidential information must be protected with Bitlocker. As you can see in the drive schema above, M: is encrypted, and so is C:, which is inside the VHD file. Unless things change between now and the release of Windows 7, a Bitlocker’d “Boot from VHD” file is an unsupported configuration.
Likewise, I am pretty certain that Windows 7 in VHD on a computer that has no operating system installed ‘normally’ (i.e. the files on the disk rather than wrapped up in a VHD file) is also an unsupported configuration.
There is no 64 bit App-V client available yet.
Sequencing applications in App-V can be a fiddly job, and also not all applications can be sequenced.
There is allegedly a very slight loss of performance for Windows 7 running inside a VHD file when compared to a ‘normally installed’ Windows 7 computer. I would argue this point because, in my opinion, any performance degradation is either negligible or unnoticeable – but I am not refuting what Microsoft has published regarding this issue.
By default, the installation of Windows 7 will not create a paging file if it detects that a VHD file is being used to boot. It took me a while to work out why I couldn’t start any virtual machines on my computer due to lack of memory because of this. You can create a paging yourself, but you’ll need to create it on a partition outside the VHD file, in my case it is on the D: drive as it is the only partition not encrypted with Bitlocker.
Using standalone App-V packages requires a hefty amount of disk space because the packages are often larger than the space that a normal installation of the application would consume. Also, by carving up the local disk into partitions, I limited myself to the amount of space available.
App-V applications can take a little longer to start (unless caching is used) compared to an installed application.

After reading this, the obvious questions is “why not just put the OS into a different partition?”. My answer to this though is simple; doing it this way I can prepare the VHD file using Hyper-V at leisure without loosing access to everything else while I am doing it. If it takes 3 weeks, then that is no problem! Also, and importantly, I can put all the operating systems I want to boot into VHD files that all reside on the same partition. I am currently running a dual-boot configuration with Windows 7 in one VHD file, and Window Server 2008 R2 (with Hyper-V enabled of course) in another VHD file, with both VHD files on the same partition (D:).

If you try any of this on your computer, please don’t later on phone Microsoft support for help. Not unless they publish a support statement clarifying that the configuration is a supported one! This is simply an experiment I have been working on that works extremely well for me as I often reinstall my computer.

p.s. for those that don't know. IKEA is a mega super store that sells modular furniture that you take home and try to build yourself.

Faster Creation of Virtual Machines

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:55:49 GMT

I recently noticed a blog post on TechNet about a new tool that was released on CodePlex. WIM2VHD is a command-line tool allows you to create sysprepped VHD images from any Windows 7 installation source (and I suspect Windows Server 2008 R2 as well) that work with Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Windows 7's new Native VHD-Boot functionality. Basically, you can create an entire virtual machine VHD file in minutes without have to go through the whole setup process of Windows. It is nice and simple to use, and after a brief moment of confusion I had it working fine :-)

To create my first VHD file, I ran the command: cscript.exe C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\WIM2VHD.wsf /wim:e:\sources\install.wim /sku:Ultimate /vhd:U:\Hyper-V\Win7.vhd /size:12000 /disktype:Dynamic

However, this failed (as shown below) with the error “Error: 0: No filePath was specified”. After fiddling around with the command line to make sure that I was specifying the relevant paths, I realised that WIM2VHD was failing because it was unable to mount the WIM file from the Windows 7 DVD.

In order to mount WIM files, you first need to have installed the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which you can get here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4AD85860-D1F4-42A1-A46C-E039E3D0DB5D&displaylang=en. One thing to note is that I installed the beta version that was released for Windows 7. I do not actually know if the current 1.1 version will work with WIM2VHD, I imagine so. The 1.1 version can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=94BB6E34-D890-4932-81A5-5B50C657DE08&displaylang=en

Once that was installed, I simply re-ran the previous command and, as you can see, had much more success!

This really is a great tool, as you can create virtual machines extremely quickly. And, the possibilities are endless because you could incorporate WIM2VHD into existing processes so that you could provision new computers easily and quickly on-the-fly using scripts.

Not quite a perfect install of Win2K8 R2

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:28:12 GMT

The beta releases of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (WIN2K8R2) have really been the hot topics of the last month or so, as you’ve probably seen if you read various blogs on TechNet/MSDN or other IT news sources. I’ve avoided commenting on how great they are, especially Windows 7, simply because pretty much everybody else has been doing it. Instead, I thought I’d blog on how I fixed a pretty common problem that people are having with Windows Server 2008 R2 on laptops, that of driver support.

My work laptop (a Dell Latitude D820 – not a bad machine, although I wish I had the D830 for full x64 memory support) runs Windows 7 x64 dual-booting with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64. Windows 7 picked up all of my hardware and installed all the necessary drivers without any additional actions required, other than running Windows Update to get the graphics card driver. My next step was to install Windows Server 2008 R2. After the final reboot, I went to Device Manager to see what state I was in regarding missing drivers; everything looked pretty good apart from 2 devices (see below picture) that did not have any drivers installed. Running Windows Update didn’t solve the driver issue either so I was stuck.

The above picture shows how Device Manager looked after final reboot during the installation of the OS. It looked like I was stuck, but after playing around a bit I actually managed to advance a bit further! The following process below might help to get it (most of it anyway) resolved for your computer as well.

Right-click on the unknown device and choose “Update Driver”.
In the path, select the Windows folder from your previously installed Windows 7 partition. Obviously this only works if you have Windows 7 installed, dual-booting. I expect that this would work though if you could get access to the Windows folder of a Windows 7 installation from another machine. Make sure the check box “Include Subfolders” is checked, and press Next.
Windows will now look for any drivers in the specified directory.
And as if by magic, drivers are being installed! :-)
Returning to Device Manager, one of the devices was now installed correctly. Unfortunately, when I repeated the above steps for the remaining device it did not work. Looking at the PnPID of it suggests that it is the Bluetooth radio, something I can do without in my Windows Server 2008 R2 installation.

Of course, this ‘fix’ is most likely to break any chance of getting support from Microsoft, and may even introduce system instabilities. But, if you are just testing out the new OS then this might be a good option for you to get all (or almost all) of your hardware installed correctly!