Naughty_Nigel

Does anyone know how we can exclude Windows 2012 Shadow Copies from our backups? I have configured the server so that Shadow Copies from three volumes are kept on the same volume together with a load of archive data. However, the shadow copies account for about 500 GB of constantly changing data, so it gets backed up twice a week even though it doesn't need it to be. (The file names are different to the source files so de-duplication doesn't work.) Unfortunately the files are unseen except by the backup software (Retrospect), and Windows insists on creating the shadow copies in the root directory of the volume concerned, so it is difficult to exclude. Any ideas, other than moving the shadow copies to an entirely separate volume? Nigel.

Sorry to come so late to this thread. We have used Retrospect for about ten years now. It's not the most intuitive programme, but it offers numerous options including tape library, binding, disk replication and so forth. The current version (8.5) works well with Server 2012. More importantly, restores have always worked when we have needed them! Nigel.

The card is a LSI Logic 20320ie. There is no part number on the present plate, and no specific reference in the documentation (only mention that both plates are supplied, and that they can be changed.) However, from past experience all of these cards seem to use the same brackets, so a low profile bracket from an Adaptec (and therefore Dell or HP) Ultra 320 SCSI card would do the job just as well. Some of the U160 cards (with the small connector) also use the same brackets. But finding one is another matter! Nigel.

Does anyone have a spare low profile bracket for an Ultra 320 SCSI card hanging about? My son bought an Ultra 320 SCSI card for his HP micro server from a well known internet auction site, but it didn't come with the promised low profile bracket. I know these things usually get thrown away, so I wondered if anyone had one going spare? They are available in the USA, but the vendor won't ship to the UK. He needs this for a college computing project, and we would rather not have to pay the full price of a new SCS card! I would gladly pay postage or send a SAE. Nigel.

All LTO drives will read and write to the previous generation of tapes, and will read from two generations back. However, if you put a later generation LTO tape into any LTO drive it will spit the tape out. The only exception is the cleaning tape, which seems to be compatible with all models. Nigel.

On a related note, we are still using an HP LaserJet 4500 (Colour) printer. The thing is built like a brick outhouse, and just plods on and on. It isn't fast but the consumables cost a fraction of the newer machines, and seem to last much longer. How many of HP's current colour laser printers will do 9,000 pages on a toner cartridge?

Thanks Tom. That sounds like a possible answer. I will try disabling SMB on the server first to see what happens, as our W7 test server seems to work perfectly well, so it seems the problem isn't in the workstations. I wonder; is there a possibility that the SMB service could have been corrupted somehow, as it hasn't been as obstinate as this previously? I do have a disk image of the server's OS drive somewhere, (created immediately after a fresh install), so I might just try restoring that. Nigel.

I am not too sure if I have posted this in the right forum, but the problem concerns a 2008 R2 server, so here goes: We are currently having problems saving Word 2007 files onto our Windows 2008 R2 Standard server. Excel files sometimes cause the same problem. This has happened in the past and then resolved itself after an hour or so, but this time it hasn't gone away. The Word files open normally, although sometimes much slower than you would expect for a 150 to 500 KB file. However, when we come to save the files everything seems to come to a halt. If we use 'Save', Word stops responding for a few moments before resuming. Next there is a bar graph display showing progress, (usually only seen when saving much larger files). This process can take anything up to about thirty seconds for a typical 150 KB letter file. Finally, Word displays an error message saying "X:\folder\sub folder\letter.doc is currently in use. Try again later." If we try to save the file with a new file name exactly the same thing happens, (with the 'Save As' dialogue box not responding for a few seconds before resuming). Sometimes we can save the file with a new name once, but cannot save it again unless we also change the file name again. There seem to be several common factors here: Firstly; this applies to all clients on the network, and all Word (and Excel) files kept on it. Secondly, the files (or their file names) are saved, but with zero file length. (If we open these files there is just a blank page; which is very worrying!) Thirdly, it doesn't seem to matter which network drive we use on the 2008 R2 server, or which folder. Fourthly, we can save files to a local drive, and then copy them to the original folder on network drive without any problems at all, (even when using the same file name). As an experiment, I have also been able to save the files to a test server (a spare W7 x64 workstation) that I set up for the purpose. Finally; this only seems to affect MS Office files. Other files, such as Adobe Photoshop and In Design files, which are much, much bigger, are unaffected. Having searched various online forums this seems to be a very common problem, affecting several generations of MS Office and MS Server, but nobody seems to have found any solutions. Does anyone here have any ideas, as I have the feeling I might be spending the weekend with a stack of installation disks, and I would far rather know what the problem is first? Best regards, Nigel.

Thank you for sharing that information. I have tried it twice (on two differernt servers) and it ddn't work, so I will try your method. Also, do you know whether it is possible to re-name the Dropbox folder so it can represent an existing folder which is shared on the network?

You can put Dropbox almost anywhere, including shared volumes on a file server. However, for reasons that are not clear to me at present, changes and additions made to files in the server Dropbox folder via the network are not seen anywhere else, (although changes made on the server, or via Remote Desktop are seen). Put another way, you can access files in a Dropbox folder on a server across the network, but if you change those files they don't get changed anywhere else. I don't know whether this is a deliberate limitation intended to stop people from using Dropbox for commercial applications, or whether it is just a limitation of the software. So, if you want to use Dropbox on a network it must be the network.

Yes; up to a point; but we also expect big corporations to exercise some moral judgement. Capitalising on floods which brought death and misery to millions doesn't sound all that moral to me, although perhaps I am out of touch with the modern world. I wonder how much of Seagate/WD's profits windfall was donated to help the flood relief effort?

Or retire. One thing is for certain. They won't be concerned about the welfare of the workforce in Thailand, (or Hungary, or anywhere else they have previously capitalised on cheap labour).

We don't know whether the factories themselves were flooded, or whether the floods simply disrupted the supply chain. My guess would be the latter (assuming they had the good sense to build the factories above likely flood levels). Regardless, I am sure the increased revenue will more than cover the cost of reinstating production.

There isn't too much to be afraid of with Windows 7. Once you get used to it you will find it much better, smoother running and more stable than Xp. Boot times are also noticeably faster. However, you will probably come across one or two peripherals where drivers simply don't exist for Windows 7, even though they were produced for Vista and Server 2008. (We had this issue with a simple SCSI card, but eventually got drivers through this forum.) Likewise, drivers for some on board devices (such as Intel System Management functions) are somewhat obscure, but can be found with perseverance. You will find that many older scanners and inkjet printers are not supported by Windows 7, (their manufacturers having used the opportunity to 'EOL' them.) If you are using a Server 2003 or 2008 as a print server also expect problems with printers and drivers, as the two just don't seem to be compatible.

Why do I get the feeling that WD/Seagate are run by a bunch of bankers? If these companies were serious about maintaining supply they would set up plants in other parts of the world to provide redundancy (rather like a RAID array), but they put all of their eggs in the Thai basket because that is cheapest, and because they can simply put prices up whenever the supply chain is interrupted to maximise profits. This is yet another case where bad management decisions [that would sink many other businesses] result in maximum profits. Perhaps they will now move hard drive production to Bangladesh so they can be guaranteed flood disruption every year?

Thank you for that, and for reminding me where the Write Caching control was. Memtest and Windows memory test were both clear. I have now disabled write caching on the System drive, and have also found a recent BIOS update which I have installed. I have also taken the added precaution of creating a drive image on my second disk, so any future restores should be quicker and easier. I will just have to keep my fingers crossed and hope it doesn't happen again, but it is soemthing of a mystery after two years of trouble free computing! NN

I have suffered serious corruption of the primary hard drive on my HP Compaq DC 7800 SFF Desktop Machine twice within the past week! :mad: I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (From Xp) about a year ago, and until I encountered this problem it has worked perfectly. The DC 7800 always works normally until I shut down. However, on two occasions recently the DC 7800 didn't shut-down as it should have done, but instead re-booted itself. It then halted at " Attempting to Boot from HDD " and would go no further. On the first occasion the Western Digital HDD was recognised in BIOS, but was otherwise dead. I tried to restore from tape, but was unable to access the drive, so I fitted a new Seagate drive in its place. (I did manage to resurrect the WD drive later by installing it in another machine where I was able to create new partitions and format it, etc.) I restored everything from tape using Retrospect, and it all worked perfectly for just over a week until the same thing happened again! On this occasion I was able to start Windows Repair, but after several hours Windows gave up and said that repair was impossible, so I restored from tape again. I cannot believe that two hard drives would suffer the same failure within two weeks? I suspect that data in the large HDD cache is not getting written to the drive before the computer shuts down, as the problem seems to be in the Registry / MBR / FAT or whatever. These drives have unusually large cache sizes (64 MB) which might take longer to write than the system allows before shutting down. (I am only guessing here). As far as I know it isn't possible to disable write caching. Has anyone else suffered similar problems? I did see on a forum somewhere that the Compaq DC 7800 was supposedly not compatible with Windows 7 Ultimate, (only Windows 7 Professional), but I find this difficult to believe as it is usually device drivers which cause compatibility problems, and presumably these are the same whatever version of Windows 7 x64 is installed? Anyhow, if you have read this far, my machine details are as follows: DC 7800 SFF Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 8 GB Ram 2 x 1 TB Western Digital Green HDD with 64 MB Cache (One now replaced with 1 TB Seagate HDD with 64 MB Cache) Nvidia Quadro FX380 Graphics Adaptor LSI Logic Ultra 160 PCI-SCSI Adaptor 53C1010C-66 (for HP external tape drive) HP Storageworks 460 LTO2 External Tape Drive Thanking you all in advance for any help! NN

Just as a post script on the above, I have now suffered a second idential HDD failure within two week! (The problem seems to be that the Registry / MBR / FAT or whatever is being corrupted when the machine tries to shut down.) I don't think this is connected with the SCSI controller or driver, but I thought I should mention it just in case anyone else has the same problem. I will post this as a seprate question on the forum. NN

If you disable the page file Windows will usually create a new, temporary page file when you re-boot. It is not a good idea to run without a page file. If you have the disk space it is best to set the Windows page file to a fixed size on day one (after running Defrag). That way the page file doesn't get fragmented. (I always set the maximum reccomended size, which is usually about double the RAM value.) If you have a second hard drive installed, set the page file on that, rather than your system drive. Your OS will read and write to two separate drives much quicker than one! Nigel.

The driver provided above is the one you need. The LSI 20160 SCSI adaptor reports itself as a "53C1010-66 Device" in Windows 7 Device Manager. Nigel.

This was extremely well timed. I tried out the new driver/controller by connecting an LTO2 drive and running a full backup to a spare tape. (I don’t' usually worry about workstation backups as everything is on the server.) Anyhow, switched on this morning, "attempting to boot from HDD". Half an hour later, still "attempting to boot from HDD". The original disk with Xp on it fired up without any problems, so we are currently transferring all the data back from the tape to a new HDD. Just shows you can never rely on anything. This is an 18 month old HP machine which has never given a moment's problem before. Running WD diagnostic from another workstation it seems that the drive is recognised all the time, but is reading and writing only intermittently. Most odd. NN

Shift + F5 in Word takes you to the last edit, even if the file has been closed and re-opened since the last edit. Very useful when working on big reports! (I just types 'bog reports' by accident) NN

Thank you so much! It works! I got the usual warning messages from Micro$oft about people stealing my data, (they would have to be sad individuals), and it seemed to take a long time, but the card is now recognsied and works. :) Regarding the SFF case; this is my desktop machine, which I wanted to attach an old LTO2 tape steamer to for various reasons. It is an HP Compaq machine with a quad core 3.0 GHz CPU and 8 GB of RAM, so it fairly flies along! Thank you again.

I think the 29160 LP might do the trick, but they don't seem easy to come by. I will have a look on fleabay. You also have to be careful as some of these come in PCI-X flavour, which isn't always obvious. Furthermore, I am using a low profile PC, so I have to be doubly careful! From what I see, nobody makes, or has made an Ultra 320 PCI card, or is that an oxymoron? (In other words, would a PCI slot even support 320 MB/Second?) Nigel

If I find them I will gladly share them. I take it you also have an LSI 20160 SCSI Adaptor which doesn't work with Windows 7? Does anyone at all make a PCI SCSI card for Ultra 160 /320 SCSI that supports Windows 7 I wonder? It is not just the high cost of the new PCIe SCSI cards which is an issue, it is also having a spare PCIe slot when there is a perfectly good PCI slot going begging. Nigel.