Joe M's questions

We have a server running incremental backups four times a week, and full backups once a week. It has been reporting hardware errors, intermittently but more frequently as of late:

Error: The device reported an error on a request to read data from media.
Error reported: Hardware failure.
There may be a hardware or media problem.
Please check the system event log for relevant failures.

Error: C: is not a valid drive, or you do not have access.

The hardware guys have replaced all hardware: VXA tape drive, SCSI cable, SCSI card, SCSI terminator, riser card, and system board, and the error is still occurring. Are there ever cases of incorrect reports like this, or could there be another hardware problem? Like I said, it's intermittent, so I don't see how it could be a permissions issue either.

EDIT: The system event log is reporting the following errors:

(Event ID 9)
The device, \Device\Scsi\adpu3201, did not respond within the timeout period.
(Event ID 117)
The driver for device \Device\Scsi\adpu3201 detected a port timeout due to prolonged
inactivity. All associated busses were reset in an effort to clear the condition. 

It reports those two errors three times in a row, about eight minutes apart, before finally failing. The tapes have also been replaced and drivers have been updated.

I've got a server that runs a full ntbackup once a week. Every week, it will log about a dozen files with the following messages:

WARNING: Portions of "\OBJECTS\SERVER\STORAGE\DOCS101\SomeFile.000" cannot be read.  The backed up data is corrupt or incomplete.
This file will not restore correctly.
Warning: Unable to open "E:\OBJECTS\SERVER\STORAGE\DOCS101\SomeFile.001" - skipped. 
Reason: The system cannot find the file specified.

Warning: Unable to open "E:\OBJECTS\SERVER\STORAGE\DOCS101\SomeFile.002" - skipped. 
Reason: The system cannot find the file specified.

...

Warning: Unable to open "E:\OBJECTS\SERVER\STORAGE\DOCS101\SomeFile.012" - skipped. 
Reason: The system cannot find the file specified.

Could not access portions of directory E:\OBJECTS\SERVER\STORAGE\DOCS101.
You may not have permission to open the file, or the directory may be missing or damaged.
Please contact the owner or administrator.

The thing is, it's never the same files. It's always a different, seemingly entirely random group of consecutive files. And it's not new files either. I've seen documents that are from as far back as 2006 show up on this list. I've checked, and all of the files are in the paths shown in the log file, and I am able to view them without problems. Any idea why this would be happening?

EDIT: This has been an ongoing problem for almost three years now, and I'm totally stumped.

We have a server that takes ~20mins to start up. Some testing was done, and we were able to determine that it is the print spooler service that is causing the slow down. Not enabling it with automatic start up cuts the boot time down to 5mins. I have not been able to find much of anything about the spooler causing a slow boot; everything seems focused on it causing slow printing. Has anyone ever seen anything like this?

I have a Windows 2003 server that is running a semi-custom backup task. The scheduled task calls NTbackup with a few switches depending on whether it is a full or incremental backup. Most of the time, the NTbackup completes fine, and the wrapper then appends the NTbackup log into its own log before adding a few final comments and completing.

The problem I am having is that sometimes, NTbackup seems to just... blank out. It always completes backup of the C: and E: drives, but then it will start the system state and not add any more messages into the event log saying it completed that. And the NTbackup log is left empty, since it doesn't write anything to the log until all the backup tasks are complete. This is causing the wrapper to append no text into its own log. That causes problems for us because we read the information out of that log to determine whether backups are failing. The wrapper task also reports that it is completing normally in the event log.

Anyone ever seen a case where system state doesn't complete consistently? To be clear, the server is not logging any error messages anywhere. It's just not seeming to complete or log anything.

EDIT: I have discovered that this sometimes happens after it begins the backup of the E: drive, so it's not specific to the systemstate portion, as it has failed on the E: drive with or without systemstate included in the backup.

UPDATE 9/26/13: I have found that VSS is posting the following two errors to the application log:

Source: VSS
Event ID: 8193
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine
IMultiInterfaceEventControl::GetSubscriptions.  hr = 0x800706bf.

Source: VSS
Event ID: 12291
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Error on creating/using the COM+
Writers publisher interface: BackupShutdown [0x8000ffff].

I've researched these some, and I went through the suggested troubleshooting. The COM+ Event System server is running and set to automatic startup. The Volume Shadow Copy server is set to manual startup. I ran vssadmin list writers with admin permission and all five writers listed showed their state as stable and last error as no error. I've read some about changing group policy permissions for the account running the backups, but I'm not clear on how or what to do. And this is not happening consistently, as I said. Sometimes the backup runs fine, sometimes it fail to complete with the errors above, and sometimes it completes with those errors. In the former case, the errors show up a few minutes after the backup just stops, and in the latter, the errors show up within milliseconds of the backup's completion.

I have written an app that we want to distribute to a large number of customers to be used as the shell program when they log onto their server with a particular admin account.

I have figured out how to change the starting program by going to Administrative Tools->Computer Management->System Tools->Local Users and Groups->Users, selecting the properties for the user, going to the Environment tab, and changing the program file name under "Starting program" to my new app.

But is there a way I could do this with some code that could be sent out and run on all these servers?

I am looking for a way to severely restrict user account access on Windows servers. Is there a way to programmatically do this? I have found a few options like forcing a user to start in a program other than explorer.exe such that it is the only thing they can access, and once they exit, they log off. I would want them to be able to do a handful of different things: run a few different apps, control printer setup, and start/stop a couple services. Am I asking too much? I'm prepared to write an application to do all these things, but I just wanted to know if there's a way to create a limited account using just pre-existing Windows settings. I could write this in VB6, VB script, a batch file, or C++. I guess if I were to write the app to do everything, I would need a way to programmatically change the start up for the limited account.

We have a new server installation that has a handful of services failing over and over. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Computer Browser
• Server
• Help and Support
• HID Input Service
• Cryptographic Services
• Task Scheduler
• Secondary Logon

There are probably half a dozen other services that I believe are failing as well. The most crucial are obviously the first two, as we need them working for all our shares to function. I have set all services to restart immediately when they fail, but the problem is that the event log is not showing anything when the services fail. It's only throwing up errors from other apps trying to access shares, so I'm not able to really see what's going on with this. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: I have not been able to run sfc yet, as I am only able to access the server remotely. However, in the meantime, this server is having more severe problems, it seems. It has, three times in less than a week, frozen up completely, such that it is not even possible to log-in, locally or remotely. I'm seeing this error a lot in the event log now: "UPS Communication Loss: Occurred on 27-Apr-2011 3:23:00 AM at device "[%IPaddress%]%servername%/UPS02"." The source is Liebert Multilink and the event ID is 1.