Recently, one of the computer in my office has failed to boot into Windows. When booting into Windows XP and to the point where you see a scrolling bar running horizontally, it gave me a blue screen of death with the following error.

……

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

……

STOP 0X000000ED (0X86FC6900, 0XC0000006, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

Two Possible Causes

After Googling about “unmountable_boot_volume”, I found the article 297185 from Microsoft’s knowledge base. It mentioned about two possible cause of this error. One has to do with the IDE cable that connects the hard drive to the IDE controller where a 80-wire cable should be used instead of 40-wire. However, I have quickly disregarded this because the computer has been running fine with the same cable since day one and in fact, it is a SATA hard drive.

The Real Cause

The second possible cause mentioned in the article is a damaged file system. It said that if the second parameter (0xbbbbbbbb) of the Stop error is 0xC00000032, then the cause would be the file system is damaged. However, in my Stop error message, the second parameter is 0XC0000006, not the same as what is mentioned in the article. Nonetheless, I followed the instructions to perform a check disk using the recovery console from the installation disc. After running “chkdsk /r” in the recovery console, I rebooted the computer. Upon the first reboot, the loading into Windows took a bit longer than usual but it was successful. When I reboot for the second time, Windows ran check disk on its own during startup and it was booting fine too. Upon the third reboot, everything is back to normal again.

It is always good to perform check disk on each system periodically even when you don’t see any problems at this moment. To do that in Windows XP, you can simply right click on the drive in My Computer, then Properties. On the Tools tab, you will find the error-checking tool there.

In my previous post, “IT Breakdown – Real Life Example”, I have told you how I got into trouble with some outdated technologies and unthoughtful IT structure. I have identified three factors that have contributed to the disaster. For the matter of not having real-time data redundancy, I would like to show you how to improve the situation with just a little budget.

The Hardware

Backing up data doesn’t involve much data processing and therefore you don’t really need a high end server for the job. The most important is having a high capacity hard drive. With the price of SATA hard drives being so cheap today, I bought a 1TB hard drive for less than $100 CAD and installed it on a spare desktop PC in my office.

The other hardware I looked at is the network card. It is better if it supports Gigabit LAN because this machine is going to connect up with all other servers on the network and backs up their data. 100Mb would be acceptable but 10Mb would be too slow. Fortunately, the spare desktop I got in my office does support Gigabit network.

The Backup Software

With the hardware ready, I needed a software that can backup all the data on all servers on to my backup system and it needs to be done serveral times a day. However, it would be stupid to copy all files and folders every time because not all of them is modified between each backup intervals. Hence, the software should support differential or incremental backup methods in which only backing up files that have been modified. With these requirements, I have came across with a software called SyncBackSE.

SyncBackSE is developed by 2BrightSparks. The program supports different types of backups including synchronization and mirroring. It also supports backing up to and backing up from a FTP server. With SyncBackSE, you can create different profiles for backing up different set of data and each of them can run on a different schedule. After each backup runs, you get a thorough report of what files have been copied or deleted, and explanations of each error that has occured.

I downloaded their trial version for testing on serveral servers that are running Windows 2000 and 2003. I scheduled 10 profiles on one of the testing server and tried backing up all critical data on the network. Each profile would run in every hour. All of them finished without problems. The reports showed some errors and explained to me that some files were locked up because it was opened by other program. Also, some files are missing probably they were deleted between the time it was scanned and the time SyncBackSE tried to copy them. These seems to be very reasonable cases and doesn’t really concern me. After testing for a few days, it was not a hard decision to purchase a couple licenses for the program.

One license is only $30, along with the 1TB hard drive, the data redundancy solution costs less than $200. Now we get almost real-time data redundancy. In case of a break down of a critical server, we can immediately switch over to the backup system by remapping all the network drives temporarily on the workstations. Users will only lost one hour of work which is not too difficult to recover. The $200 is well spent and within budget.

From time to time, I have experienced some sort of corruptions to my Windows taskbar. Sometimes it is due to viruses messing it up while sometimes it is because I have played too much with it. Right now, my taskbar looks like this.

The most difficult part is adjusting it back to its default layout. How can I easily restore it to default look?

It is actually quite easy because I have found a script on the Internet that will do this for you in just a couple seconds. The script is written by Kelly Theriot and Doug Knox. You can find it on their website. On their website, you can download the script with the link that says “Restore Taskbar to Default Functionality”. After saving it to your computer, you can double-click it to run it. Right away, your taskbar is restored to default.

There are also many other useful scripts and registry tweaks on their website. You should bookmark their site as you will probably find other scripts that solves your other problems.

After working for 3 months for my new employer as a system administrator, a disaster finally breaks out on one of the mission critical server last weekend before I had time to implement any preventive measures. This breakdown could have cost the company to shutdown its business if we were not fortunate enough.

Outdated IT Structure

In this company, we have a very outdated IT structure. There are about ten file servers and each of them stores a different set of data for different departments. All of the servers are at least 7 years old. The one with the highest capacity could only hold up to about 150GB of data. It was probably when a server’s hard disks are full, another server is installed to hold more data.

Since each server holds a different set of data, there were no redundancy of the data. The server that broke down last week holds the most critical data in our company. We produce a new product everyday based on those data. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to make it and we could lose all our clients at once.

Improper and Insufficient Backup Plan

There are also two tape backup devices, one external and one internal. Each tape backup device is responsible for backing up data on a group of servers. There is a software that we use to perform the backups every night. The software has its own database to store information about what has been backed up. However, the device that backs up the data on the broken server happened to be on the same machine. The result? We couldn’t retrieve the data from the backup tapes because the backup software’s database was inaccessible. Even if we were able to retrieve the data from the tapes, we wouldn’t have enough time to do that before our deadline.

Whose Fault?

The cause of the whole situation was determined to be a bad memory stick. The server had 2 sticks of 256MB PC133 ECC memory and one of them had gone bad. The server requires two sticks at a time to operate and we were unable to find any spare RAM of the same type in our office. After many hours of thinking and searching for a resolution, we ended up pulling one stick of RAM from two other servers and install them on the critical machine temporarily until we get replacement memory.

My (And Your) Learning

It was a simple problem but evolved into a deadly situation due to several factors.

• Insufficient stocking of spare parts, especially for outdated hardware
• No real-time redundancy of critical data
• Backup device installed on the same machine as the data being backed up

The first point can be easily countered if you keep spare parts on hand. However, if the hardware is too old, it can be very expensive to purchase spare parts or they may not even be available. Therefore, it is justifiable to upgrade your hardware to newer technologies after certain period of time, especially when your old ones are still working at this moment.

When planning for data backups and redundancy, it is important to factor in the amount of time it takes to retrieve data from the backup media. The importance of real-time data redundancy is relative to how critical they are to your daily business operations. If it is highly critical, then tape backups are not sufficient to keep your data online all the time.

If your company have a similar IT structure like mine, then you should start looking into the three areas listed above immediately before anything goes wrong, which will happen very likely.

Sometimes, when a user is using Outlook Express to receive an email that was sent from Outlook, the email attachment may seems missing from Outlook Express. If you check the size of the email, it is quite large for a plain text email and the attachment is actually there but you just can’t see it. This is a common problem with Outlook when it is set to compose email in Rich Text format.

Solution 1:

There are two ways to solve this issue. The easier way is to ask the sender to configure his/her Outlook so that emails are composed in either HTML or Plain Text format.

1. In Outlook, click on “Tools” > “Options”

2. Under “Mail Format” tab, change the message format to either Plain Text or HTML.

Solution 2:

The second option is to use other program to extract the attachment from the email.

1. In Outlook Express, drag the email to the desktop. You will have a .eml file.

2. Open the .eml file with Winzip and extract the “winmail.dat” file.

3. Open winmail.dat with fentun.exe and you should see the original attachments of the email. (You can Google on fentun.exe and you should be able to find a download link of the utility.)