Virtually Jason

Several months ago I ran into that issue with accidentally rebooting a server after changing the “active” partition and ending up with a nonbootable system.  We solved it with a linux boot CD (not unlike Trinity , although the one we used was specifically oriented towards disk management), but I’ve just learned that there are Microsoft tools that could do the same thing.  What we were unable to find at the time is DaRT .  That’s Microsoft’s Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit.  As the name informs, it’s a pretty sweet suite of tools that can be used to diagnose and recover from a variety of Windows problems.  Here’s a list of some cool use cases: Reset a local administrator password Edit the local Registry Restore deleted files (assuming those sectors haven’t been overwritten) Securely delete a partition or drive Open Computer Management (including Disk Management, which is what I needed back then!) Copy files to/from the system with Explorer and network...

I was performing a late night p2v of a Windows 2008 server the other night and I ran into an issue that I figured I’d share. This server was initially installed with the help of Dell’s server utility, and as such the first partition on the drive was one of those small utility partitions. Standard practice during a p2v is to leave those partitions behind. Since the server’s not on Dell hardware any more, Dell’s utilities aren’t going to serve a purpose. Most of my experience with p2v is with Server 2000 and Server 2003 (and in fact, I’ve done more NT than 2008 at this point), and with 2003 I’ve seen those partitions cause more harm than good. We moved forward with the cookie cutter p2v of the server and the first anomaly was the fact that the utility partition was the Active partition (as opposed to the C: partition with Windows installed). Given that Converter doesn’t give you the option to leave behind an active partition any more (and I do miss that option), we decided to forge a...