I have been using Symantec’s Veritas Backup Exec to backup files on my network. Additionally, I am not using tapes, I use external hard disk drives as rotating media for my backup schedule. My server runs on Windows 2008 Server R2.

Up until recently, I was using Backup Exec 12.5 and three 500GB Buffallo external drives and had no problems. About a month ago, I replaced the Buffallo hard disks with three Samsung 1.5TB ones and I also decided to upgrade to Backup Exec 2010.

Anyhow, I installed Backup Exec almost a month ago and the backups have been running OK since. I mean, there were no error or failed jobs in the job history log, so yes, I thought everything did run OK. That was until I had to recover a mailbox for an employee.

The recovery wizard showed that there were no backups for the mailbox store for almost a month. I tried everything I could think of but the backups wouldn’t show up.

I informed the user that I couldn’t get data before that time and focused on troubleshooting the problem. What I did first was to recreate the job and test it and that’s were the problem showed up. When I recreated the job and tried to run it again, the job stopped exactly when it was about to reach the first 4GB of backed up data.

The reason was simple. My media size, in Backup Exec, was 4GB but my external hard drives were formatted as FAT32 (they come like that from the factory). FAT32 doesn’t support files that big and that’s why my newly created backup failed.

This made me think though, why the rest of the backups didn’t fail all this time. Well they did fail, but Backup Exec wouldn’t show them as failing. It’s maybe a bug or something, maybe because I upgraded from a previous version without recreating the jobs, I don’t know why.

What I did was to convert my FAT32 disks to NTFS by following this tutorial http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881 and everything was resolved. Backups run successfully now and I can recover data just fine.

Just a heads up, don’t trust that your data is backed up without testing a recovery scenario. I don’t want to know what would happen if I found out that my data is not backed up, on a disaster recovery situation. Imagine the whole network going down and me not having backups. I don’t even want to think about it…

Last week I had to set up a Windows 2008 RRAS on an HP DL160. Well despite the fact that the server arrived without a hard drive, it had no media drive either. I ordered a tray hard drive, but I wouldn’t pay more money for a component that most probably I am going to use just for the installation.

So how was I going to install Windows, without a DVD drive?

A USB drive did just fine.

This is the process I used to setup the USB drive to install Windows 2008 on a server. The same process can be used to install Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

You are going to need the following

1) An empty USB drive with 4GB minimum capacity

2) A DVD with Windows 2008, or the Windows 2008 ISO, or a folder with Windows 2008 files

3) A PC on which you have administrative rights.

I have done the process on a Windows 7 PC, I suppose it will work on Windows Vista also but I haven’t tried it on older Windows OS. I see no reason for the process not to be working on Windows XP though.

Anyhow, here’s what you should do next.

1. Plug in the USB drive. Open a Windows Explorer and note the drive’s letter.

Write down the USB drive letter.

2. Open a command prompt with administrative rights. The easiest way to do that is by going to Start->All Programs->Accessories-> right click on the Command Prompt icon and choose Run as Administrator

3. Next we need to create a new partition on the USB drive, set it as Active, format it and make it bootable. In order to do that, we are going to use DISKPART (it’s a system utility in Windows). Type Diskpart inside the command prompt you opened earlier. You are now in a utility that allows you to manage drives on your PC, BE CAREFUL AND MAKE SURE YOU ARE MODIFYING THE CORRECT DRIVE WHEN TYPING COMMANDS. Below is a screen capture with all the commands you have to enter and what the system returns after each successful command.

4. Type List Disk. A list of all the drives present will appear. Write down the USB drive number, we are going to need it in a while. In my computer it was Disk 8 as you can see in the image.

5. Type Select Disk # where Disk # is the number of the disk you wrote down earlier. In my case it was Disk 8. The command I typed was Select Disk 8.

6. Type Clean

7.Type Create Partition Primary

8. Type Select Partition 1

9. Type Active

10. Type Format FS=NTFS and wait until the format finishes, it might take a while.

11. Type Assign

12. Type Exit

13. Your USB drive has been assigned a drive letter WHICH MIGHT BE DIFFERENT FROM THE ONE IT WAS ASSIGNED IN THE BEGINNING. Write down the new drive letter. On my computer the drive letter was L. You are going to need the command prompt again in a while so keep it open.

14. Now you are going to need the Windows 2008 installation files. Either insert your Windows 2008 DVD, either mount the Windows 2008 ISO using Daemon tools or something similar or find the folder where you keep the Windows 2008 files on your computer.

15. In the command prompt navigate to the Windows 2008 files.

16. Assuming you are in the Windows 2008 folder, there will be a subfolder called Boot. Type CD Boot to navigate to that folder.

17. Type Bootsect.exe /NT60 <DriveLetter>: where <DriveLetter> is the letter you wrote down in step 13. In my case the command was Bootsect.exe /NT60 L:

The command to make the USB bootable

18. If the process was successful continue by copying all the Windows 2008 files from the folder or DVD, in the usb. Open the folder or DVD using Windows Explorer, copy everything and then paste it inside the USB drive.

19. Your USB is now set up to boot and install Windows 2008 on any compatible server or computer. What you need to do is configure the server or computer to boot from USB, at the BIOS.

Well that’s about it. It worked in my case. If you follow the guide you won’t find any problem I think. Comment below for any further help

Since the dawn of the internet (and that particular time I installed Stumbleupon on my computer) I have found many websites that promote or provide information on the best freeware or open source programs. Well most of them, have titles like “100 freeware programs you should have on your computer”, “The best 50 open source utilities everyone should have” and “The top 70 free applications for PCs”.

It’s not about quantity. In order for a list to be useful, it has to be concise and specific.

I decided to list the freeware or open source programs, I actually use on my computer. A small, list of useful applications that I believe it will benefit everyone.

Here it goes.

1) Mozilla Firefox Web Browser

OK, you knew I was gonna list this. It’s one of the best browsers around and I have been using it since it was published. It’s fast, reliable and can be customized with add-ons to fit any requirement.

There are faster browsers, like the Google Chrome, but no browser can be customized like Firefox. Sometimes it uses too much memory, but in general it’s a great all around browser.

You can download it here: http://www.getfirefox.com

2) Foxit PDF Reader

Can a free PDF viewer be better than the Adobe one?

It looks like it can.

Foxit PDF viewer has many advantages over the Adobe viewer. For starters it’s faster. Well that’s about it to be honest. It’s much lighter than the Adobe one and doesn’t want to update every couple of days, downloading 100 MBs of useless addons and language updates.

You can download it here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

3) CDBurnerXP Media Creator

For many years I used Nero Burning Rom for creating media. That was until I bumped on CD Burner XP.

It can do anything that Nero or any other commercial program does and it’s free. I really like it’s simple and intuitive user interface and the many options it has.

You can download it here: http://cdburnerxp.se/

4) Notepad ++ Text Editor

Notepad is a great little piece of software. It has been bundled with Windows since ever. OK, I know it’s nothing special, but it’s comes pretty handy when you need to jolt down something quickly or if you need to copy paste a piece of code, temporarily.

Well, Notepad ++ is even better. It has much more options than Notepad and it has a tabbed interface where you can have many text documents open in one window. It can format text according to programming language formats, it can search through multiple documents and replace specific text and it can save files in any encoding.

You can download it here: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

5) Filezilla FTP Client

Browser FTP clients are mostly useless. Especially the IE one. If you tried one, you understand what I am saying. There are many FTP client applications but most of them are not free. FlashFXP is one of them and CuteFTP also.

Filezilla is  an equivalently good FTP client with all the options someone will need in an application like that. I have been managing all my websites, using Filezilla and have never had a problem.

You can download it here: http://filezilla-project.org/download.php

That sums up the list. What I did, is I opened my programs and listed the open source programs I actually use. I have more for testing purposes or simply because I forgot to uninstall them. These five are the ones I use the most though.

Comments are welcome.