Monthly Archives: October 2014

Remote Update iDRAC 7

Posted on by

Install the racadm tools on your local system (http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/3205.racadm-command-line-interface-for-drac).

 

Download the iDRAC firmware and enable a TFTP server (google for it, or get one from solarwinds: http://www.solarwinds.com/downloads/)

Run the following command:

racadm -r <idrac address> -u <user> -p <password> fwupdate -a <tftp server> -g -u

 

The update will start and take a few minutes.

Convert Disk to VDH

Posted on by

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

download: http://download.sysinternals.com/files/Disk2vhd.zip

 

Introduction

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.

Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.

To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.

Command Line Usage

Disk2vhd includes command-line options that enable you to script the creation of VHDs. Specify the volumes you want included in a snapshot by drive letter (e.g. c:) or use “*” to include all volumes.

Usage: disk2vhd <[drive: [drive:]…]|[*]> <vhdfile>
Example: disk2vhd * c:\vhd\snapshot.vhd

Why I can’t convert my Windows Server 2012 R2 Core to GUI

Posted on by

Error:

Install-WindowsFeature : The request to add or remove features on the specified server failed.
Installation of one or more roles, role services, or features failed.

The source files could not be downloaded.

Use the “source” option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the feature. For more information on specifying a source location,see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243077. Error: 0x800f0906

Coretech Blog » Blog Archive » Why I can’t convert my Windows Server 2012 R2 Core to GUI
Here are the commands to update the source files with PowerShell

# Create folders
New-Item -Path C:\WS2012R2 -ItemType Directory
New-Item -Path C:\TEMP -ItemType Directory

# Copy the install.wim to temporary folder
Copy-Item H:\sources\install.wim C:\TEMP

# Remove the read-only attribute from the copied file
Set-ItemProperty -Path C:\TEMP\install.wim -Name IsReadOnly -Value $False

# Get the Windows Image Index
Get-WindowsImage -ImagePath C:\TEMP\install.wim

# Mount the Image
Mount-WindowsImage -Path C:\WS2012R2 -ImagePath C:\TEMP\install.wim -Index 2

# Add the Updates to Windows Image
$Updates = Get-ChildItem C:\Users\kaj\Desktop\Updates
foreach($item in $Updates){
Add-WindowsPackage -PackagePath $item.FullName -Path “C:\WS2012R2”
}

# Commit the changes
Dismount-WindowsImage -Path C:\WS2012R2 -Save -Verbose

source: http://blog.coretech.dk/kaj/why-i-cant-convert-my-windows-server-2012-r2-core-to-gui/