Disk2VHD

     Mark Rossinovich and Bryce Cogswell at sysinternals have created all kinds of great free utilities over the years. Disk2vhd has to be one of my favorites. I have used it to virtualize my old XP machine to use on Windows 7 and used it to virtualize SBS 2003 servers to do complete off site swing migrations. But just like any other tool there are limitations and times that it doesn't work as planned.

   If you have disk or array issues on the machine you are using it on, chances are that it will fail to work at all or end up giving you a corrupted VHD. I recently created a VHD from a machine that was giving me array errors in event viewer. If I mounted the VHD with 2008 disk manager, the primary partition showed up as RAW. After searching posts I found a utility called testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk. Another great free tool to have in your kit. I used it to fix the disk configuration and was then able to boot the VHD.

I hate when things blow up

Excerpt from RFC 822:
6.3. RESERVED ADDRESS

It often is necessary to send mail to a site, without knowing any of its valid addresses. For example, there may be mail system dysfunctions, or a user may wish to find out a person's correct address, at that site. This standard specifies a single, reserved mailbox address (local-part) which is to be valid at each site. Mail sent to that address is to be routed to a person responsible for the site's mail system or to a person with responsibility for general site operation. The name of the reserved local-part address is: Postmaster, so that "Postmaster@domain" is required to be valid. Note: This reserved local-part must be matched without sensitivity to alphabetic case, so that "POSTMASTER", "postmaster", and even "poStmASteR" is to be accepted.

So in this day of spam filters that gobble up mail or spit it back at you anytime some RFC isn't followed, most of us will have a postmaster@domain  address in our organizations. You had better get rid of it before doing an SBS2003 to SBS2008 migration. Something as simple as that can cause irreparable damage to Companyweb and Exchange on the new server. Requiring restore of source server and restarting the migration after removing the postmaster address. Here is a link to some of the gotchas for the great adventure called SBS Migration. http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2009/02/19/sbs-2008-migrations-from-sbs-2003-keys-to-success.aspx

My First Post

I have always wanted to have somewhere to share tips tricks and gotchas that I learn on a day to day basis and frequently completely forget until I run into the problem again.  My thoughts are, if I write it down somewhere, that it could save me ton's of time the next time that particular issue comes along and I can't remember the solution. So if any of my friends and colleagues would like to add to this, it might save us all some time.