Kuan Wai's space

When you try to boot your Vista PC up and ended with the error which says "BOOTMGR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart. blah blah". and so, being an obidient person, you proceed to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, only to find that you are back to the same screen. So common sense tells you that when something is missing, unlikely that it will come back from no where. The next thing you do is to pop in the Vista DVD and proceed formatting your PC, totally skipping the diagnostic tools that Microsoft had given you to make your life somewhat easier.

Microsoft had actually included a tool in the Vista DVD to fix BOOTMGR file problem, and its quite a handy tool to save your trouble of reformatting your PC.

1. Boot up your PC using the Vista DVD.
2. At the language selection screen, click Next.
3. On the next screen, click on Repair your computer.      
4. In the System Recovery Option screen, select the Windows installation and click Next.
5. In the Choose a recovery tool screen, select Startup Repair.
6. The recovery tool will the proceed to find the problem and fix it. When the recovery process is completed, remove Vista DVD and reboot your computer.

Network settings is one of the first few configurations you would do after installing the server OS. You need to have proper configured

network settings in order to join the domain, to provide network service etc.

So to configure network settings inside Server Core, you will need to

1. Launch Command Prompt.
2. Type in the command netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces.
• This command basically list out all the network adapters install in the machine.
• Take particular note of the Idx, which is the identifier to the respective netword adapters.
3. In the Command Prompt, type netsh interface ipv4 set address name=<Idx> source=static address=<IP_Address> mask=<Subnet_Mask> gateway=<Default_Gateway> where
• <Idx> is what you get from step 2
• <IP_Address> is the IP address (duh)
• <Subnet_Mask> is the net mask for <IP_Address>
• and <Default_Gateway> is the default gateway.
4. Lastly, network configuration without DNS is never a full network configuration, unless of course you are sitting the server in a small network. So to configure the DNS, type in the command prompt netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name=<Idx> address=<DNS_IP_Address> index = 1 where
• <Idx> is what you get from step 2
• <DNS_IP_Address> is the IP address of the DNS server.
5. Verify the configuration by using the ipconfig /all command.

A full executable is available for download here. It is a 450MB package consisting of 5 languages (English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish) designed for mass deployment. For home users, it is advisable to download and install using Windows Update (it is smaller in size).

And of course before any major patching, please RTFM to make sure your system is prepared for the updating.

Vista Ultimate users, if you had installed any additional language pack not included in the 5 mentioned, you will not be able to install this SP 1 release (also known as wave 1). A second wave of SP 1 (around April) will be release consisting of the remaining languages. So you can either wait until then, or uninstall the non-supported language pack for the time being.

1. Launch Command Prompt with Administrative privilege.
2. First find the name of the computer by using the hostname command.
3. After obtaining the computer name, use this command netdom renamecomputer <old_computer_name> /newname:<new_computer_name>.
4. Restart computer.

Gone are the days of NT Backup. Its missing from Windows Vista, it will never be back in Windows Server 2008. In place is the new Windows Server Backup (WSB). However unlike NT Backup, you don't get much backup options with WSB. You don't get to choose the files you want to backup. All that you can do is to backup volume(s) and the system state. And to make things worst, unlike backing up volumes, system state can only be done thru the command line using the wbadmin command.

Like any other roles and features, Windows Server Backup doesn't comes installed. You will have to install it manually. To install, follow the steps below.

1. Launch the Server Manager.
2. On the left panel, click on Features.
3. Then on the right panel, click on Add Features.
4. In the Add Features Wizard, search for Windows Server Backup Features and click on the check box. By default, only the Windows Server Backup is selected.
5. Then click Next and Install then Close.
6. Windows Server Backup is now available in the Administrative Tools folder.

To perform a backup, follow the video.

To perform a system state backup, you will need to

1. Launch Command Prompt with administrative rights.
2. Type wbadmin start systemstatebackup -backupTarget:<Drive Letter>: replace <Drive Letter> with drive of you choice.
3. When prompted to start the backup, just key in Y and the backup will start.

Whenever you attempt to type an email address (that had been used previously), you'd notice Outlook will provide a drop down list containing previous similar addresses you had used. So after some usage, the list gets longer and you want to clear the history and finding no setting in Outlook and you start to uninstall and reinstall Outlook. So here's a faster way or you.

1. Close Outlook.
2. Launch Windows Explorer, type %appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook in the address bar and hit enter.
3. locate files with extension *.NK2 and delete them (usually named Outlook.NK2).
4. Launch Outlook.

Another method which allows you to delete selected history.

1. In Outlook, type the address that you wanted to delete.
2. Once the drop down list appear, use your arrow key and navigate to the address to be deleted.
3. Hit Delete key on your keyboard to delete it.

SCSI disk are usually faster than IDE disk. This too applies to virtual hard disk. But if you ever got into a situation where you have deployed your VHD as IDE disk, you can still convert them into SCSI disk without having to rebuild the VHD.

1. Launch Virtual Server Administration Website.
2. On the side panel, under Virtual Machines, choose Configure and select the VM that you want to configure.
3. Click on SCSI adapters in the configuration page.
4. Click on Add SCSI Adapter, SCSI adapter ID: 7 and click OK.
5. Leave the VHD as IDE disk and start the VM.
6. Once inside the VM, go to Device Manager, look under Storage controllers (Windows Vista) or SCSI and RAID controllers (Windows XP). You should see the following
   • Adaptec AIC-7870 PCI SCSI Adapter or
     • If you have Adaptec AIC-7870 PCI SCSI Adapter, you will need to install a new driver. The Adaptec driver will do, but it is a slow SCSI driver. To update the driver
       1. Right click on the adapter and select Update Driver...
       2. Choose Install from a list or specific location and Have Disk.
       3. Browse to %Programfiles%\Virtual Machine Additions and click OK.
       4. The driver will then be installed. Make sure that Microsoft Virtual Machine PCI SCSI Controller is listed in device manager now.
   • Microsoft Virtual Machine PCI SCSI Controller
7. Shutdown the VM.
8. Move the IDE VHD boot disk to a SCSI interface.
9. Start the VM.

Believe it or not, Server 2008 Server Core is probably the fastest Windows installation I have ever done, from the first installation screen till I see the logon screen.

For those who have installed Windows Vista and Server 2008 previously, you will notice that the installation procedure for Server Core is identical.