Petri IT Knowledgebase Team

The following article explores the puzzling situation in which an external disk drive behaves as if it is “Read Only” but there is no indication in the Windows UI that indicates this is the case. A walk-through is provided to troubleshoot and ultimately provide a solution to this situation.

Backing up virtual machines presents different challenges than backing up physical machines. Ignoring these challenges may lead to an incomplete or even failed backup even though it may not be apparent until you try and restore the backup. This brief article goes over these important considerations and will help you make sure your VM backups are complete.

In the event that you have a VM that hangs and becomes unresponsive and it resides on a host machine with other VMs that are running fine, simply restarting the host machine is not an option. In this article, learn alternative methods to killing a hung VM without interfering with other healthy VMs.

There are times when you may need to manipulate a virtual machine and it could be valuable to know the VM’s process ID. If, for example, the VM has become unresponsive, knowing the process ID could help in closing the VM without interrupting another VM on the same host machine. This brief article will show you how to obtain a VM’s process ID and GUID.

Backing up virtual machines is a little different than backing up a traditional system. The following article provides a nice walk through for backing up virtual machines on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V using Windows Server Backup.

Sometimes you need to backup a virtual machine that needs to remain in a running state. Volume Shadow Copy Service allows volumes to be backed up while applications continue to write to those volumes. In order to perform this task properly, you must first register the Hyper-V VSS writer with Windows Server Backup. The following article explains how this is accomplished.

Windows Server Backup on Windows Server 2008 R2 is an excellent backup utility that takes care of safe backups of just about anything on your Windows Server 2008. As one would expect, a convenient log of all of these backups is kept but it is not very apparent how one clears this log. The following article describes the few simple steps to clear the log.

A well documented error exists when you try to use the Hyper-V management tools from a Windows Vista or Windows 7 machine and try to connect to a remote Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. Fortunately there is a workaround to this issue but it does involve several steps. This article walks you through the required steps that will allow you to connect from your Vista or Windows 7 machine.

One of the more tedious tasks of a Windows install is entering the product key. This is compounded when you have to set up dozens of computers at a time. Fortunately, in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, you no longer have to enter the product key to install the OS. Instead, Windows uses a list of valid install keys. The following article displays this list and shows you where to find it.

A lot of the effort that goes into administering an Active Directory can be minimized by using Replmon. This tool provides a very useful GUI to accomplish several key tasks for AD administrators. Unfortunately, it does not come installed on Windows Server 2008, though it can be. This article will walk you through the process of setting up Replmon on Windows Server 2008.

The “Access Denied” error message is a common issue when accessing administrative shares on one Windows 7 PC from another, especially when they are members of a workgroup. In this article we’ll show you how to troubleshoot and fix this issue by doing a quick registry edit.

Windows Server Backup is built-in to Windows Server 2008 R2 and allows you to back up a full server, a selected list of volumes, the system state, or specific files or folders. Learn how to install the Windows Server Backup feature using three different installation methods: the server manager, the command prompt and PowerShell.