Month: June 2016

Deleting old Windows Server Backups from an external hard drive

Deleting old Windows Server Backups from an external hard drive

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I encountered an issue recently whereby one of our clients servers was running low on disk space. This resulted in the server being unable to complete a Windows Server Backup.  The backup destination in this instance was an external USB drive.

To resolve the issue I carried out the following steps:

  1. Opened Disk Management
  2. Right Clicked the backup partition on my backup drive and selected the option for ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’
  3. Specified the drive letter as ‘F:’
  4. Opened an Elevated Command Prompt
  5. Ran the command ‘diskshadow’
  6. Ran the sub command ‘delete shadows oldest f:’
    (Ran the command multiple times until I was happy with the free disk space)
  7. Removed the Drive letter from Device Management

Please note, this is really only a temporary fix.  The correct solution is to replace the Backup drives with drives that had a bigger capacity.

Credit to the following article for finding this solution:
http://www.mcbsys.com/blog/2012/11/delete-old-windows-server-backups/



Server 2008 R2 (SBS2011) – DNS Access Denied – Network (Unauthenticated)

Server 2008 R2 (SBS2011) – DNS Access Denied – Network (Unauthenticated)

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Recently I had a client with an SBS2011 who lost power to the server. Client PCs were unable to access the server resources and errored saying that the PC may have been compromised.

When the server had rebooted the network location had changed to Unauthenticated. When trying to access the DNS console I was getting an error saying Access Denied.

See below for reference:

DNS Access Denied

DCDiag was failing on connectivity but Active Directory Users and Computers was accessible.

After a while I managed to resolved the error by running the below command followed by a reboot:

nltest /sc_change_pwd:domainname.local

Command Description:
Changes the password for the trust account of a domain that you specify. If you run nltest on a domain controller, and an explicit trust relationship exists, then nltest resets the password for the interdomain trust account. Otherwise, nltest changes the computer account password for the domain that you specify. You can use this parameter only for computers that are running Windows 2000 and later.

Once the server had rebooted the network location changed back to ‘Domain’ and DNS was accessible. All client machines was then able to access the server.

Comments on my blog have indicated that this fix also works with Server 2012 R2.