Wednesday 12 June 2013

Windows 8 - Keeps losing its mapped drives

Geez what a mission !!

We implemented a new server at one of our clients and ran into the strangest issue.  Everything worked 100%... Pretty smooth cutover... But then the issue began...

The windows 8 machines kept losing their mapped drives... Reran the login script just to see no mappings in Explorer! Frustrating... Cannot map the drives manually because the computer sees the drives as mapped already.

After ALOT of research and trying "fixes" recommended by bloggers .. Still had the same issue

Turns out its an actual Microsoft bug within the operating system.  Luckily for us they realised how critical this issue is and have an update available to sort this issue

After installing the update my users were finally happy :)  good day, indeed

Fix:

Download and install update KB2795944

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2795944

Thursday 31 January 2013

Windows 8 Pro Upgrade - Failure to configure updates

Windows 8 ... Its pretty.  Thats about it.  Its just nice to look at, I am not sold on the idea.

One of our clients did a very clever thing... He went and bought a few notebooks from some website all with just Windows 8 versions on them.

Now as you know Windows 8 is the equivalent to previous OS release home editions.

Should be easy right ... Its just a simple upgrade to Pro.

No.

Turns out it was a preloaded service and software issue.

Damn manufactures that load all kinds of crap on computers before clients purchase them.  Nobody ever uses their "built-in" applications in anycase!

Note to manufactures.  Do what your supposed to do and SELL the computers, stop trying to be "market leaders" by adding extra software, services etc to computers.  All you are doing is slowing down machines and wasting hard drive space.

Phew.. blowing off some steam :)

Issue

Manufacturer:  Lenovo

When upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8 Pro you get an error saying "Failure to configure updates... Reverting changes".  Machine reboots about 3 times and tries every single time to configure the update and then reverts again.

Afterwards when you get to log into the machine it advises that the extra features were not installed for Windows 8... (Thank you for stating the obvious Microsoft)


What was done to resolve the issue


  • Press Windows key + R
  • Type "services.msc" in the Open box and click OK
  • Locate the service called "Nalpeiron Licensing Service"
    • Right click this service and stop it
    • Switch the service to Manual
  • Try to Install the extra features again to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro

In my case I just disabled the service and uninstalled Nitro PDF

Thank you Lenovo StinkPad for an interesting waste of my time.

Saturday 19 January 2013

Error E4F3000E: Snapshot failure while using Volume Shadow Copy Service

So we decided to upgrade one of our client's systems from SBS 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2.

With this we also implemented Symantec System Recovery 2013.

Issue I was experiencing is that my backups kept failing !!  I kept getting an error and the company was about a week behind on backups.  As you all know this is very concerning.

Here is what I did to resolve the error below.  I hope this helps others out so that your client's backups does not fall behind.

Error:

Error E4F3000E: Snapshot failure while using Volume Shadow Copy Service

To resolve:

Step 1

Right click one of your drives in Computer and select Properties



Select the Shadow copies tab

Step 2

Now select every drive you have and click Settings.
Make sure you select the "No limit" maximum size for all drives.
Make sure that ALL the drives has the No Limit maximum size selected !!


Now go back to your System Recovery and run your backup again.  Things should run smoothly now :)