Software RAID-1 in Windows server has a pitfall worth remembering: redundancy is working only when Windows is booted and is up & running. When machine is booting, it loads the OS from whichever drive is selected as first in the boot order in BIOS. If failing drive happens to be the first - the one from which Windows Server boots up, then two things needs to be done:
- BIOS settings have to be changed so that healthy secondary drive is used for booting, and
- Secondary Plex has to be selected as a default boot drive in Windows Startup & Recovery configuration.

Having Hyper-V adds even one more step. Hyper-V does something as the boot time, and is apparently enabled only on the first drive in the boot sequence. After you have made healthy secondary drive the first in boot sequence, secondary drive's boot routine needs to be manually adjusted to include loading Hyper-V, or you will get the dreaded, useless "Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running" error when starting a virtual machine. To update your newly-selected boot drive for loading Hyper-V, run a Command Prompt as Administrator and execute following command:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Reboot the server again - this time your secondary drive is bootable as far as BIOS concerned, secondary plex is used to boot windows, and Hyper-V is made to be loaded from the secondary drive too.

Upgrading or replacing a motherboard on a machine running Windows Server 2003 (in my case it was Windows 2003 R2 Standard Edition with Service Pack 2 x64) is relatively straightforward, and more or less works as described in the MS Knowledge Base article: you start upgrade process by running Windows setup while old motherboard is in-place, and once upgrade process reboots the machine, you intercept it by turning the computer off and replacing the MoBo, and then allow upgrade process to continue. It worked alright, and wasn't too long a process.

What the KB article didn't mention is that after the upgrade a few things may be broken or missing. In my case there were two big things broken:

• IE was corrupted in a way that prevented downloading files by clicking a link. Page browsing still worked and "Save target as..." worked, but clicking a link that redirects to a file download resulted in the strange error message: "The requested look-up key was not found in any active activation". My way to fix it was to upgrade IE6 to IE7, but since IE7 download links were those redirect links that didn't work, I had to install FireFox, which had a link accessible via "Save target as", and then I used FireFox to download and install IE7.
  
  
• .NET Framework 2.0 has disappeared, wracking havoc making pretty much all applications (SQL Server Management console, ASP.NET apps in IIS) not working. Fixing it was not too bad though - I downloaded and installed .NET Framework 2.0 x64, then made a couple of runs of Windows Update to ensure the server won't try to reboot soon after being brought online, rebooted the machine just in case, and that was it.

Overall entire process, although not completely seamless or worry-free, took only about an hour, not counting time required to physically replace the board.

Recently I started getting "IO Error" while backing up my computer that runs under Vista. To back up I used Vista's "Backup & Restore Center". Somewhere closer to the end of the back up process it would just throw this IO error seemingly with no good reason. About five last attempts to backup ended with this error. I used to get that error a long time ago, and then the error would occur only sometimes, and on different systems. That time I was able to eventually track the problem to faulty USB cable, but this time was different - error was occurring on just one machine, and once it started happening - it never went away.

I noticed, however, that on the machine where the error was occurring, system drive where Vista and most of everything else is installed, is running out of free space. I got "only" 1.7 GB left. I didn't think that should be a problem, since 1.7 GB is still quite a bit. Nonetheless, I decided to reshuffle partitions to increase the size of my primary partition. Once I've done that, I made one more attempt to backup my machine, and this time it's worked.

The bottom line: be sure that drive you back up (or maybe just your system drive) has enough free space.

I will update this post if the error resurfaces or if I find out that amount of free disk space has nothing to do with the error.

Just-announced Windows Home Server is a good news for UltiDev LLC even though Windows Home Server currently is not much more than glorified Network Attached Storage and an automatic backup system. Windows Home Server is based on Windows 2003 Server and therefore does not have TV recording functionality for Media Center Edition one would expect from household server. But despite being driven by Windows 2003 Server, Windows Home Server does not seem to have web server and email server on it.

Our HttpVPN and Cassini Web Server products will make MCE attractive for every developer who can make a web-based application. To be truly useful household platform, all software for household servers should web-based and should accessible securely and reliably on Internet as well as and inside the home network. Good news for us is that we do it while Microsoft does not seem to.

I think people will feel much more comfortable when their data is stored on their own servers at home and being accessible everywhere using secure web connection, instead of having data stored on third party servers. Real "web 2.0" (God, I hate this marketing gimmick!) is not only user-generated content, but user-generated content stored on user's own servers and securely accessible from everywhere. This is what we are making happen with HttpVPN, which makes every programmer who can write ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, Perl, Python, ASP, Cold Fusion (or whatever else web development tool he/she is using) a potential winner in the huge but completely untapped market of home server software.

I feel good to be at the right place at the right time. You need to join in.

Norton Ghost 9 does not work on Vista. That's a diagnosis that could have stopped me from using Vista altogether. However, I found that Vista's Backup & Restore center does what it's supposed to, with some caveats.
I skimmed through the Internet trying to find answers to a few questions that bothered me:
1. Is it possible to restore system using Vista setup DVD and the OS image on the external drive?
2. Is backed up image compressed?
3. Is it possible to restore system to a partition or volume of the size that does not match the original OS partition size?

I was surprised to find that information I was able to find on the topic was just derivative from Microsoft marketing material. Here's what I found.

1. Yes. all you need to have to restore your system is Vista DVD and the backup image on any kind of media. Just boot from Vista DVD and then follow the lead of these screenshots:






2. Image is slightly compressed - not nearly as much as Ghost did. Original size was 35 GB, backup image size was 28 GB. I had to upgrade my external backup drive to ensure Vista backups can be handled from now on. Another interesting thing is that core of the backup image is a file with .vhd extension - the same used by MS Virtual Server. I wonder if it will be possible run saved OS VHD image in MS Virtual Server.

3. This is the worst part. Restore completely removed all the partition information on the target drive. My target drive had two partitions: first for the restored OS was not formatted and was larger than original OS partition from which the image was made. Second partition had a formatted volume with some information on it. Before restoration started it asked whether is it OK to delete all information "on drive C:", without specifying what drive C: means. I assumed it's an unformatted partition, because formatted one was present and had another letter. Boy, was I wrong. Apparently what Vista called "drive C:" was actually physical disk 0, thank you very much. Vista's Restore completely re-partitioned the drive to make destination partition of the same size as the original one. This is the most destructive Restore utility I have ever seen. After restoration was over, I had to use Disk Manager's rudimentary knock-off of the Partition Magic utility that allowed me to extend the destination partition to the desired size. Of course, I had to re-create second partition and restore the information from the backup copy. So please MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR DESTINATION DRIVE before using Vista Restore function!

[July 16, 2007 UPDATE:] After downloading Nero 7 Ultra Edition Update I was able to upgrade my original dysfunctional Nero 7 Essentials. I tried to uninstall Nero 7 Essentials, but uninstallation failed. I had to use Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to get rid of Essentials first. The good thing was that after Essentials was gone, Ultra Edition upgrade found registration key of Essentials and used it to get installed. Naturally, after it was installed it still only had functionality of Essentials, not Ultra. Nero 7 Ultra came as a ridiculous 120+ MB download, with tons of junk, like ASK.com toolbar, so I had to spend time making sure it won't get installed. Funny, but help system is not included into the 120 MB download. To my surprise there was no "Burn DVD Files" option in Nero Start Smart, which used to be there since Nero 6. Fortunately, I found "Burn DVD Files" in the Nero Express UI itself. At this point I haven't burned any dual-layers, but single layer DVDs burned at 16x speed on my NEC 3550A drive just fine. Hopefully days of no decent software for DVD burning on Vista x64 are over.
Success: Nero 7 Essentials with Ultra Edition Update.
[END OF UPDATE]

[ORIGINAL POST:]
Tried to burn Dual-Layer ISO image on Vista x64 with a few different pieces of software. These are the results:

Success: (with caveats) ImgBurn - does the job, but created a few dual-layer coasters, and almost invariably fails the burned disk verification at the end, even if disk is perfectly playable.

Failed : Nero 7 Essentials - filed to start after installation.
Failed : ISO Recorder V3 64 Bit - failed after finishing the first layer.
Failed: Active ISO Image File Burner - failed after finishing the first layer.