Backup – Absoblogginlutely!

BSOD image We’ve been tracking down issues with Windows Server 2016 on a multitude of servers this week where the servers will reboot and come back with Unmountable Boot Volume which is a pretty nasty experience for oncall. So far we’ve mainly seen it on Domain Controllers but also on a Hyper-V server. The solution is typically to do a last known good boot on the machine and then try to work out what has changed on the server and needs redoing. So far we’ve had issues with duplicate servers in Webroot and Automate along with a couple of server functions not working correctly.

Initially we thought it was a problem with Windows Updates, but it seems that the culprit is Storagecraft’s SPX version 6.7.4
The solution is either to downgrade to version 6.5 or get a patch for 6.7.4 that fixes this issue.

Download location for SPX 6.5.2:

For 6.7.4, You will need to get the patched stcvsm.sys from Storagecraft and then apply these instructions.

Patch is a very manual process. New version of the stcvsm.sys driver is 2.2.73.0.36
1. Install SPX 6.7.2:
2. Do NOT reboot
3. Rename %windir%\system32\drivers\stcvsm.sys to %windir%\system32\drivers\stcvsm-rtm.sys
4. Copy the 2.2.73 driver to %windir%\system32\drivers. Be sure to select the correct ‘bitness’.
5. Reboot

It’s been very frustrating to have gone through this issue without any notification of this pretty serious bug from #Storagecraft

Edit: Today I discovered that Storagecraft now have a more detailed knowledge base article about resolving Inaccessible Boot Device after upgrade to 6.7.x. Judging from the comments I’ve had here, I’m not the only one who has had this issue and it still keeps happening for some users.

Photos

Dropbox successfully saved my photos today.

By Andy on Saturday, July 21, 2012

Today was the Columbus Color Run 2012 race, a great 5k race where you run through paint stations where dried color “paint” is thrown at you. Great fun, very colourful and an ideal opportunity for taking photos and video. I was there for about 3 hours before and after the run and took several photos. Towards the end, my phone suddenly asked me to put an SD card in the memory slot. I thought this was odd but maybe the card had filled up. Resetting the phone didn’t help. When I got home I took the sd card out, put it in two card readers and neither of the readers would recognise that a card had been placed in the slot as far as the computer drive letters were concerned (it detected the card was inserted but no disk was mounted – not even an unformatted disk).
Needless to say I was really annoyed as I had lots of photos and video on there that I hadn’t even seen yet. As it turns out, the quality of most of them wasn’t very good – shooting through ziplock bags is not recommended. I’m going to have to try plastic wrap next time. Anyway, this evening I remembered that I had Dropbox installed on the phone – this automatically synchs photos and videos taken from the phone up to the dropbox servers and then downloaded to your other dropbox client pc’s. Sure enough, when I checked my dropbox folder – all the pictures and videos had been synched – I had recovered all my photos. Needless to say I’m VERY pleased.
Note that you don’t have to synchronize videos and if I remember right the defaults are only to sync video when on a wireless connection but fortunately I had turned this to sync on wifi and 3G 😉
If you’ve not used Dropbox yet, then I highly recommend you check it out. It will allow you to backup contents of your phone automatically (and if you process the photos on your computer they will already be there when you get back to the computer – no need to fiddle with hooking the phone to the computer). You can also use it to keep your documents stored offsite safely – even if you only have one computer, you still have a copy in the cloud that you can access from a webpage if required.
The good news, it is even free to start with – you get 2gb for free and we both get an extra 500Mb because I referred you if you use this link to Dropbox
Incidentally my Columbus Color Run photos are on Facebook here – you don’t need to be a Facebook member to view them.

RevDrives

Rev drive causing bad_pool_header

By Andy on Friday, December 15, 2006

Yet another reason I hate Rev drives – had a client whose pc would blue screen when the backup would start to a rev drive. The error was bad_pool_header and fortunately I got an error in imdrvfsf.sys By downloading the software drivers from Iomega and rebooting the backups are now able to write to the disk. A quick search on google for bad_pool_header iomega shows this is a very common problem with iomega’s solution being to pay $20 for an upgrade to the software (or to just ignore the problem). Hopefully this post will help someone out but please note that this page is not the iomega support forum

Backup

Image ghosting woe’s

By Andy on Tuesday, July 25, 2006

I’ve been trying to backup the main pc at home as it’s getting really really slow for a 1 year old pc. Kristen blames it on all the stuff I keep installing on it which is probably true. The weird thing is that I can’t see anything in task manager or perfmon that shows why it is so slow. CPU and memory usage is low yet the machine sometimes takes ages to respond so it’s a reinstall time.

However, before doing that I wanted to image the hard disk – I’ve been attempting to do this since Saturday now. MicroCenter were doing a 160gb hard disk for $40 after rebates so I thought I’d ghost the original disk to my external usb disk and then restore the image to the second disk. (No link as the rebate was only valid until Saturday)

I had several attempts of doing this, but found that the pc would freeze whilst in the middle of the image. Yesterday morning I started the image off and when I came home from work it was still going…. until I shredded something and it crashed ghost with an error back to dos.

I then tried Acronis true image which said it would take 20 hours to ghost the image (of 40gb!) but again this morning it had frozen after running overnight.
By the end of last night I was really fed up with the thing as it shouldn’t be this difficult so I went to sleep and decided to try again this evening.

I’ve a feeling that for some reason my external usb disk is being detected as a USB1 disk instead of USB2 which is why the original ghosting is taking forever.

I’ve now had the idea of ghosting the image direct to the new hard disk from the old one – if that works (which is giving me a realistic time of about an hour to ghost) I may be able to copy the ghost image back to the original disk and then restore it back over to the new disk.

Once I have a working ghost source I can scrub the new disk and reinstall from scratch and also see if I can get vista on the machine too……

Tag Archives: Backup

Fixed: Unmountable Boot Volume error with Windows Server 2016 and Storagecraft’s SPX

Dropbox successfully saved my photos today.

Rev drive causing bad_pool_header

Image ghosting woe’s