Yet Another IT Professional Blog

I’m a big fan of easy deployment, scripting, automating etc… Therefore I love deployment tools. I am constantly using tools like Microsoft System Center, WDS, MDT, etc… Thanks to these kinds of tools, I can be alone and have the workforce of an IT army :)

I am not sure if this happens under all circumstances but I wasn't able to use the boot.wim file from a Server 2012 R2 setup media. In my WDS server, I added a boot.wim file from the Server 2012 R2 setup ISO as a new Boot Image. I used a vm to boot into the PXE server and try the new boot image but I got the following error; File: \Windows\System32\winload.exe Status : 0xc000000f Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.

I am studying for an upcoming Microsoft exam #70-411 and I was practicing the new WDS (Windows Deployment Services) features in the Windows Server 2012 R2 and I ran into a little problem.

Yep... Another update and another bug. I just applied this months updates on my computer at home and guess what? It caused almost a "fatal" error on my VMWare Workstation virtual machines! As soon as my computer boots, I tried to fire one of my vms and I got the following scary message.

Altough it's been a while that Windows 8 is out on the market, I never had to play around with the Windows 8 images and syspreps as I had to with Windows 7. I decided to prepare me a nice updated image of Windows 8 in a vm and sysprep it and use it as template for my lab environment. The plan is simple...

Recently, I was working on a vSphere 4.1 upgrade to vSphere 5.5 and of course, first thing first; I had to update all the physical servers to the latest versions of BIOS, firmware, drivers… At a first glance, this seems an easy procedure. I’m thinking to use the Dell iDrac console to update most of the stuff but I soon realized that I wasn’t able to update NIC firmware and BIOS through the iDrac. When you go to the Dell Support web site to download the drivers for a specific model of server, you’ll realize that Dell is offering at least 4-5 different troubleshooting and updater utilities… Some of them are as big as 7.5GB ISO files! The problem with these utilities is that they are not really well documented and it takes a lot of effort to prepare and use them.  Here are a couple of examples;

I am an owner of the Dell Venue 8 Pro since it has been out and to be honest, for a device that I only paid $299, I am extremely happy about it. It's not a powerful device where I can use it as a replacement of my laptop or my desktop... Not even close! But...

Problem : Windows Image Backup is failing while backing up a drive. In my case, it was a "bare metal" backup scenario. You may also find the following error in the "Event Viewer" under "Applications and Services Log, Microsoft, Windows, Backup" "The backup operation that started at '‎2014‎-‎05‎-‎13T16:49:41.618242900Z' has failed with following error code '0x807800C5'

Recently, one of my users lost all his auto-complete list from his mailbox! For me, this is no big deal as I barely send emails but for our employees who sends / receives hundreds of emails per day, it's a pretty big deal and a very practical feature to have. Outlook will create a little database of the email addresses that you send or receive emails from into a file generically called "Auto-Complete". In the previous versions of the Microsoft Office suite, this file was the famous "NK2" file.

One of our users was having bizarre problems with her account. We tried to troubleshoot to find out what was causing the real issue but nothing was clear. Before I even tell you what the reason was, let me tell you first what the symptoms were. First user reports that she has a warning when she logs onto her computer.   I confirmed that she was getting a Windows 7 balloon warning “ Windows cannot locate the server copy of your roaming profile ”. When you browse Event Viewer , Windows Logs\Application , you should see another error with the error ID 1521 with a description “Windows cannot locate the server copy of your roaming profile and is attempting to log you on with your local profile. Changes to the profile will not be copied to the server when you log off. This error may be caused by network problems or insufficient security rights.” Just these 2 symptoms were indicating a Roaming Profile issue, which makes sense because the user is part of an OU, which roaming pro