Sam McGeown

If you’ve logged onto the properties for your IIS install and found that the ASP.NET tab has mysteriously disappered, you can try a couple of things.

Firstly, try re-registering ASP.NET with IIS using the ASPNET_REGIIS.exe located in the .NET installation folder:

When the Dell engineer said “they’ve asked if you can reinstall the OS” my heart sank. Not because I felt like he was weasling out of work - unusually they were very helpful. Not because installing XP is a hard task, I’ve done it over 100 times on all sorts of hardware.

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  <font size="2"><strong>n:\></strong> <em>Aefdisk 1 /delall /formatfat /pri:1024:6 /ext:0:7</em></font>
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  <font size="2">Woah woah woah! What&rsquo;s all that?! The command runs &ldquo;Aefdisk&rdquo; on&nbsp;hard disk &ldquo;1&Prime;&nbsp;with the &ldquo;/delall&rdquo; flag, which deletes any exisiting partitions, &ldquo;/formatfat&rdquo; which formats the&nbsp;next partition FAT. &ldquo;/PRI&rdquo; is a primary partition, &ldquo;:1024&Prime; is the partition size, &ldquo;:6&Prime; is the&nbsp;hex partition&nbsp;type which in this case is FAT16 >32mb. &ldquo;/ext&rdquo; is an extended partition, &ldquo;:0&Prime; tells it to use all remaining space on the drive, &ldquo;:7&Prime; is the partition type which is NTFS.</font>
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Recently I found the need to retrieve the key from an existing Exchange Server for a reinstall - the software is legally licensed but the key was somehow lost. A trawl through my registry revealed that the key is stored in an obscure place:

I’ve just removed a domain controller (DC) from my root domain, the very first server not only in the domain, but the forest. The roles were migrating to a newer server, far more up to the job, but it isn’t a job to be taken lightly. If you mess up the root domain, you’ve potentially got problems all the way down your domain hierarchy.

Incredibly irritating error when you go to install under your user account when you’re using mapped drives for your documents. All our domain users have a userfolder on the server, it’s mapped as z:\ and there is a folder redirection set up. It’s pretty standard in a corporate/domain environment, so why does it cause so many Vista installations to fail?

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  <font size="2">If you&rsquo;re using UAC (User Account Control) you might need to map the network drive as the administrator. This is a pain in the @$$ because you have to disconnect the drive under your user account first. Of course, if you&rsquo;ve got ANY documents open, this will upset your profile. Anyway, steps for that: </font> <ol>
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      <font size="2">Disconnect the currently mapped drive. </font>
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      <font size="2">Open the command prompt as the administrator. Type "net use \\[server]\share and check that it&rsquo;s mapped by typing &ldquo;net use&rdquo;.<br /> </font>
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      <font size="2"></p> 
      
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        <font size="2">Open explorer and navigate to your shared folder and right click, use the &ldquo;Map Network Drive&rdquo; wizard to map the share under your user profile. </font>
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        <font size="2">If all above fails (as in my case), your only option is to log in as a user that doesn&rsquo;t map drives (machine local admin works for me, but then you have to enable that user as it&rsquo;s disabled by default. You also have to provide a password for it - don&rsquo;t forget to disable again after an install.)</font>
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        </font> </ol> </li> 
        
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            <font size="2">I could rant about how rubbish this is, but to be honest I am to hacked off at wasting my afternoon trying to work around this.</font>
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            </font> </ol> </div>

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, that’s for various reasons, one of which was that I have been preparing for, and taking, my MCSA exams. So here it is…

I’ve finally cracked the installation problems with VS 2003 SP1 on Vista. The problem seems to be that the SP must be installed under the same credentials that Visual Studio was installed. I.e. I installed Visual Studio under the domain administrator credentials, but I run my day-to-day under a standard user credential. When installing the SP1 I was elevating my standard user credential rather than running as the domain admin. I don’t know what difference that makes to anything, but it’s worked!

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  <font size="2">&nbsp;Next time you boot&nbsp;the Virual Machine, you&rsquo;ll have to re-attach the .vmdk in it&rsquo;s correct location. </font>
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