My Desktop Frustrations ...

Some of you know that I have been having a good time lately with a Hard Drive crash on my desktop. It appears that my 400 GB Western Digital (yes, another Western Digital) has crashed and went into a really weird state (... even more fun to troubleshoot under Windows 7 ...).

For a quick description, in case you see something similar, my desktop went to a state where the OS was unusable, but no errors were being thrown. Friday night, I played a Podcast for my son and let him listen to that, Saturday morning, when logging onto my PC, I logged in and then sat and waited for the desktop to appear.

Well, this of course, was not normal behavior, so I eventually (after waiting 5 minutes) performed a hard shut down. Upon rebooting, I was greeted with the same issue, it made it all the way into the OS, but wouldn't make it past the log in screen (even though I typed my password right).

Given that I recently upgraded my Video Card (love my nVidia 9800 GT), I thought maybe my PC had finally overheated and my Video Card was toast. I started pulling things apart, inspecting the drives and looking for / smelling for anything that didn't look right.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise, I didn't find anything ... At this point, I was really concerned, but let my PC sit and just didn't even want to think about it. Instead I just worked on the laptop throughout the weekend.

Come Monday, I spent some serious time looking at the parts and dropped another, smaller, slower drive I had in and dropped the OS onto the drive to allow me to check all of the other components. I spent the rest of the evening verifying that everything else was working as desired.

... I hate Western Digital drives ...

I now have, shiny, a second 1.5 TB Seagate drive and I have mirrored the two drives to allow me a little better performance. SO FAR ... SO GOOD ...

I have installed Windows 7 flawlessly and it appears to be running very nicely. I have data being restored to the PC from the backups and it shouldn't be too much longer until my PC is back up and running exactly as it should be.

Have a great night!!!

12 Simple Ways To Impress Your Boss And Everyone Else

This was an interesting article I read last night ... If nothing else, it might help teach someone to suck up a bit (i.e., maybe I will finally learn).

12 Simple Ways To Impress Your Boss And Everyone Else

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Scanners

In our organization, we are running a document imaging product that uses High Speed Auto Feed scanners to create and publish documentation to support the business needs for each of our customers.

Yesterday, I had a meeting to discuss how to test these for a future upgrade (all future upgrades) of the document management software. Today, I have one of my co-workers diligently working to see if we can use our big network Canon Multi-Function Devices (Canon 3570 Printer / Scanner / Copier) to perform testing as needed.

If this is successful, hey, we can avoid buying a device used a couple of times a year for testing or, more likely, a device we buy that somehow gets worked in for production use and then unavailable when necessary for testing upgrades in the future ...

Now realize, I do understand that by opening the door to using our high end multi function devices, we may end up with those being used when there is a back log of things to scan and process. If this happens, we will have to enforce that this will need to be scheduled (if nothing else)...

Details to follow.

Altiris, Altiris, Altiris ... Reporting in a nutshell

So, outside of my normal meetings and some random discussion about things going on with my current projects (only a couple of hundred, no big deal), I have been tasked with creating a series of reports to show how our deployments are progressing...

Ideally, I would like to see us be able to develop a report that shows each package that we have, how many users are targeted, how many have been active on the network in the last 30 days and how many have success or failure codes... The percentage of success should be based on the successful installs vs the 30 day log ins (as I don't believe that holding us accountable for PCs not on the network is fair).

This approach will give us a long term deliverable for our Altiris implementation and allow us to quickly see how any particular deployment is progressing.

More details to follow (along with the sql for this once finished).

OK, a little SQL code to show some possibilities here:

SELECT A.[AdvertisementName]
, [Succeeded] = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [AeXInv_AeX_SWD_Execution_Summary] AS B WHERE A.[AdvertisementId] = B.[AdvertisementId] AND (B.[Status] = 'Command executed' OR B.[Status] = 'Finishing asynchronously'))
, [Failed] = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [AeXInv_AeX_SWD_Execution_Summary] AS C WHERE A.[AdvertisementId] = C.[AdvertisementId] AND C.[Status] != 'Command executed' AND C.[Status] != 'Finishing asynchronously')
, [% Successful] =
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [AeXInv_AeX_SWD_Execution_Summary] AS B WHERE A.[AdvertisementId] = B.[AdvertisementId] AND (B.[Status] = 'Command executed' OR B.[Status] = 'Finishing asynchronously'))
* 100
/ ((SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [AeXInv_AeX_SWD_Execution_Summary] AS B WHERE A.[AdvertisementId] = B.[AdvertisementId] AND (B.[Status] = 'Command executed' OR B.[Status] = 'Finishing asynchronously'))
+ (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [AeXInv_AeX_SWD_Execution_Summary] AS C WHERE A.[AdvertisementId] = C.[AdvertisementId] AND C.[Status] != 'Command executed' AND C.[Status] != 'Finishing asynchronously'))
FROM [AeXInv_AeX_SWD_Execution_Summary] AS A
GROUP BY A.[AdvertisementName], A.[AdvertisementId]
ORDER BY A.[AdvertisementName]

Friday Afternoon Jokes

An elderly man in Kentucky had owned a large farm for several years. He had a large pond in the back... It was properly shaped for swimming, so he fixed it up nice with picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some apple, and peach trees.

One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond, as he hadn't been there for a while to look it over. He grabbed a five-gallon bucket to bring back some fruit.

As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. As he came closer, he saw it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his pond.

He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end.One of the women shouted to him, "we're not coming out until you leave!" The old man frowned, "I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the pond naked."
Holding the bucket up he said, "I'm here to feed the alligator."

Some old men can still think fast.

FT Job - New Mass Storage Drivers

For starters, this post is for Windows XP images, I focus on Windows Imaging (WIM) format, so feel free to modify for ghost images (and if you do, please link back so that everyone can follow along).

So, as part of my Full Time job, I am tasked with setting up and deploying new PC models as part of our single standard image (for 32 bit desktop and laptop models) when we decide that we are going to use a new piece of hardware.

One of the painful points in doing this has always been getting new Mass Storage Drivers (for those that use imaging technologies, it's the painful 7B error at the end after dumping the image onto the new hard drive).

This error of course stems itself from the fact that there is not a standard SATA chipset (and for Vista it's not needed) that all mother board manufacturers use.

Don't sweat it, this is a quick run down of what I am planning on implementing for my company, that will make the work effort as light as possible for anyone that has to update these going forward. I plan to follow this post up with several posts on the engineering of the actual plan and any tweaks along the way. Call this my design document...

We currently are using the Micrsoft Deployment Toolkit and a single WIM image for deploying all of our hardware models for our end users. In doing this, each time we receive a new hardware model with a new Mass Storage option, we have to break open the WIM, add the driver.sys, the driver.inf, update the system registry with the critical device database entries and then update the services to reflect the proper information for the new drivers.

<<<>>>

Going forward, I will be creating a MassStorage.WIM file that will contain, simply, the driver.sys, the driver.inf and the updated c:\windows\system32\config\system files. I will then update the Task List with a task, after Installing the Operating System, Install the Mass Storage WIM file by using the command "imagex /apply MassStorage.wim c:\". The index will of course be the version of the MassStorage.WIM necessary to apply the latest set of files.

Have a great day.