Mitchell Skurnik's questions

I just physically moved my home lab from one house to another and my storage space for my primary array will not re-attach. The message I get is "Error attaching or detaching virtual disk: Failed to attach virtual disk to MyServer."

I tried a few things including Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object IsManualAttach -eq $true | Set-VirtualDisk -IsManualAttach $false and after multiple attempts I was able to set the value to $false.

I was able to pull these error messages from Event Viewer:

An error occurred during method execution.

Class:      SPACES_VirtualDisk
Method:     Attach
ObjectId:   [REDACTED]
Error Code: 4

And

An error has occurred during method execution.

Class:      MSFT_VirtualDisk
Method:     Attach
Error Code: 4
Error Message:

Failed
Activity ID: {68137d67-7406-4e9b-b566-050f30b9ea14}

Running Get-VirtualDisk | Connect-VirtualDisk in PowerShell returns:

Connect-VirtualDisk : Failed
Activity ID: {90b49a62-37c6-4dc1-aabc-1489763f0696}
At line:1 char:19
+ Get-VirtualDisk | Connect-VirtualDisk
+                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (StorageWMI:ROOT/Microsoft/...SFT_VirtualDisk) [Connect-VirtualDisk], CimException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : StorageWMI 4,Connect-VirtualDisk

At this point I am not sure what to do. I do have some commercial recovery software from RunTime Software but I would rather avoid doing that as that would require my to buy additional drives to offload all my data onto it. I do have a backup of 85% of it online but I would rather not go that route if possible.

I have been using an old Intel based Dell desktop as a Small Business server 2011 (SBS 2011 Standard x64) box for the last 6 months. Last week I purchased an older AMD Socket F server that will do just fine for this business (2x quad-core, 32GB ram, IPMI, SAS). I tried putting the existing SATA hard drive into the new box and it tried to boot but it would restart and then want to repair the installation. I only had a few hours to try this before the store opened at 8 so I had to put the drive back in the old machine.

What is the easiest way to migrate from the Intel box to the new AMD box? I have a lot of data already on the existing machine:

• Exchange
• SharePoint
• DHCP
• DNS
• Point of Sale databases

If possible I would like to just migrate the data with as little hassle as possible. I only had a 1.5 hour window to migrate this morning but on Tuesday evening I will have 10 hours. I have some extra drives that I keep as hot-spare replacements that I can use to create a new OS drive if I need to use the SBS migration utility.

I have an old ASUS KFN32-D SLI/SAS dual socket-F motherboard that loves to randomly drop certain hardware on reboot. I upgraded the server about a year ago to have Dual Quadcore procs @ 2.5GHz with 32GB ram running SBS 2011. I would really like to continue using the server if possible. The devices that drop are the onboard NIC (link lights stay on however), and and all PCI slot devices (excluding the video card). This really sucks since there is no onboard IPMI device for me to use when I am away (and it loves to do this when I am away). Windows simply does not see the devices (there are no errors in device manager). The only way to fix this is to reset the BIOS to system defaults, reboot, and then re-enable the RAID controller (otherwise it will try to boot individual disks). Thinking maybe it was just a bad BIOS chip, I replaced it but that didn't help and I have re-flashed the BIOS many times. This only seems to happen to Server 2008, vista, and 7 on this board (I used to use this as my workstation). Odly enough it never happens with XP pro (x86 and x64) so I am not sure if it is a driver issue.

The motherboard does have a SMBus connector (6 pins: FAN_PWM, I2C_CLCK#, N/C, GND, I2C_DATA#, +5VSB) and I was wondering if I can do anything with that (IPMI?).

Another option is finding out how to use the RS232 port for remote management and then attaching that to another server/computer in the rack.

If not, are there any inexpensive IPKVM modules that I can get that that are sub $200 USD?

If you know what might be causing the system to do this, please let me know.

I have 2 pairs of serial devices (a scale and a POS pin pad) hooked up to 2 pcs (4 serial devices in total) with windows xp embedded sp3 (x86) running RDC/rdp 6.0. I am using those machines to RDP into virtual machines running Windows 7 enterprise (x64) where my point of sale software is installed. I need to redirect the local PC's com ports (com1 and com2) over to the virtual machine. I configured the rdp file to send the com ports and it does as I can see the ports if I add a printer (they show up as ts033 and ts034) but the software I am using requires it be called com1 - com10. I have tried to use "net use com3:\device\com1, net use com3:\tsclient\ts033" and a few other combos on my VM to redirect the ts com port to a "real/virtual" one.

I don't have the money to spend on purchasing a serial server (new or used) or purchase the amount of licenses/seats for 3rd party software. Even the cheapest solution from ebay to purchase 4 new serial servers comes out to about $100 plus you have to use 4 wall warts and it involves extra cabling.

My only other option is to get 8 db9 to rj-45 adapters and send this over 4 existing cat5e lines and physically attach them to the vm server. I'd rather avoid having to do this as again it requires running extra cables from the POS terminal/pc as well as running cables from the patch panel to the VM server. I would much rather use the net use method if you could tell me how or some other free/opensource software that is out there.

Let me know if you need any other information or if something is unclear.

What would be the best software for me to use to do a windows media live stream. I have a CDN from softlayer and would like to start using this for live streaming. I own Expression Encoder but other people that I want to have use it do not.

I need the software to be able to send what I see on my computer screen with sound.

I upgraded my ASUS KFN32-D SLI/SAS motherboard to the latest BIOS version and swapped out the 2 dual-core procs with 2 quad core procs. After installing Server 2008 Datacenter onto the system I noticed that it was not connected to the network. I open device manager and see no network adapters. I have to go up to View -> Show hidden devices to even see the virtual WAN Miniport adapters.

This problem happens in Vista and Windows 7 (all x64). What is even stranger is it all works in x86 mode. What in x64 could be causing windows to not even detect hardware that works in x86? Is the boot manager possibly the culprit?