I have a real love-hate relationship with Symantec. I love some of their corporate products. Backup Exec has so many features, the price is very competitive, I like how they license their Hyper-V Agent (though SBS Edition should include one…) and when it works, it works really well… But it doesn’t work really well, usually. It’s prone to weird errors and things will just stop working until you restart services or reboot servers or pause and unpause your server or put a device back online. Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 AKA Norton Ghost with a Higher Price Tag is a fantastic program. It’s my go-to P2V solution, the backup and recovery works well and is easy to manage.

Except for the whole there’s-this-known-issue-where-your-server-will-BSOD-when-you-first-use-it thing. Yeah, that thing. Because I always have to look through Google for this link, I’m posting it here. Maybe someone else will find it and it will help them. This link has the basics though all it really does is link to the MS KB with the hotfix, which is http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980856. This page gives more details and pertains to BESR and BE2010 installed on the same machine. Symantec isn’t too clear about why this happens other than to say that the problem is the Symantec VSS Writer.

I had a lot of fun fixing this last night when the password to extract the MS hotfix didn’t work. Wonderful! I remembered I left the MSU file on another client’s desktop, the only nice thing about needing to install this all the time, so I popped in, emailed it to myself, downloaded, installed, rebooted, and all was good! But this shit is still shit and I’m tired of shit.

Yes it is.

I bought an Apogee Big Ben last night. It wasn’t exactly high on my to-do list but the price was absurd so I just couldn’t pass it up. It’s a good investment, one of those things that immediately makes every single microphone I use sound better just by turning the damn thing on and it will be good to have when I upgrade my AD/DA conversion down the line. Read about it here, if you want.

Because I can, this blog will be used for whatever I want.

I have spent the last few hours fighting with Backup Exec System Recovery, trying to perform a physical-to-virtual conversion of a Windows Server 2003 machine on a Server 2008 R2 machine. It kept giving a few errors relating to an inability to mount the backup file. The BESR event log showed the following:

Error EC8F1F48: The 'Microsoft VHD' conversion process could not be completed.
Error EC8F1F44: Cannot mount recovery point 'D:\Backups\ZDRW-TS\_C\_Drive001.v2i'.
Error E98F0032: RPAM failed to mount image.  
Error EBAB03F1: No more data is available. (UMI:V-281-3215-8008)
Details:  
Source: Backup Exec System Recovery

Wonderfully descriptive! Windows event log showed nothing. Symantec’s KB suggested that something was interfering with the backup process but I discovered I was able to mount them using the Recovery Point Browser, suggesting that the recovery point was fine. Odd. There was nothing installed on the server other than BESR and some basic Windows roles, nothing that would interfere with the process. So what would stop it from converting? What was running on the server that could possibly interfere with the operation of a program?

UAC. Disabled, rebooted, tested. Fixed. No documentation about this anywhere. Hopefully it will help someone else!

…you upgrade to 12GB.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220542&cm_re=Patriot_Viper_Xtreme_12GB_(3x_4GB)--20-220-542--Product)](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220542&cm_re=Patriot_Viper_Xtreme_12GB(3x_4GB)--20-220-542-_-Product)

Site is up, theme is set, studio area is complete. Looking forward to having this up and running.