We use the offline servicing features of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) to patch our images. It’s a great feature that usually saves us time and enables us to update images without constantly unsealing and resealing. But after applying the latest and greatest patches to a base Windows 7 SP1 WIM yesterday and then testing it, I began to encounter this dreaded error during Windows Setup:
Windows could not configure one or more system components. To install Windows, restart the computer and then restart the installation.
Bummer. Fortunately, since the image was serviced offline and nothing else had changed, I could reasonably assume that one of the patches was the culprit. But which one? To find out, I rebooted the system into Windows PE and opened C:\Windows\Panther\setuperr.log. Here’s what I found…
2013-01-03 18:11:12, Error CSI 000000fb (F) Done with generic command 8; CreateProcess returned 0, CPAW returned S_OK
Process exit code 4294967295 (0xffffffff) resulted in success? FALSE
Process output: [l:117 [117]"ERROR - .NET 4.0 is not installedERROR - CLRCreateInstance call failed, 0x80004001.
ERROR - Initialization failed.
"][gle=0x80004005]
2013-01-03 18:11:12, Error [0x018007] CSI 000000fd (F) Failed execution of queue item Installer: Generic Command ({81a34a10-4256-436a-89d6-794b97ca407c}) with HRESULT HRESULT_FROM_WIN32(14109). Failure will not be ignored: A rollback will be initiated after all the operations in the installer queue are completed; installer is reliable (2)[gle=0x80004005]
2013-01-03 18:11:14, Error CSI 00000107 (F) Done with generic command 9; CreateProcess returned 0, CPAW returned S_OK
Process exit code 4294967295 (0xffffffff) resulted in success? FALSE
Process output: [l:117 [117]"ERROR - .NET 4.0 is not installedERROR - CLRCreateInstance call failed, 0x80004001.
ERROR - Initialization failed.
"][gle=0x80004005]
It turns out that one of the updates that was installed in the offline WIM had a .NET 4.0 dependency, but the base Windows 7 SP1 image does not have .NET 4.0 installed. I would have expected the DISM utility to simply detect that .NET 4.0 was a prerequisite and skip over the update, but apparently it didn’t, or maybe there’s an issue with the update itself. At any rate, there’s no way to inject .NET 4.0 into an offline image – it requires unsealing, installing .NET 4.0, and resealing. Instead, I opted to remove the misbehaving update. To figure out which one it was, I opened setupact.log and looked for additional details that weren’t in the error log. I found these lines prior to one of the errors:
2013-01-03 18:11:12, Info CSI 000000f2 Begin executing advanced installer phase 38 (0x00000026) index 59 (0x0000003b) (sequence 98)
Old component: [l:0]""
New component: [ml:344{172},l:342{171}]"Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Utility-Gac.Resources, Culture=en-US, Version=7.1.7601.16398, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, ProcessorArchitecture=x86, versionScope=NonSxS"
Install mode: install
Installer ID: {81a34a10-4256-436a-89d6-794b97ca407c}
Installer name: [15]"Generic Command"
Using Google-fu, I was able to determine that the failing component was part of KB2506143: Windows Management Framework 3.0 for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. From there, I just needed to mount the WIM and remove the update using DISM:
I was working on my laptop a few weeks ago, minding my own business, when processes suddenly started hanging left and right. I opened resource monitor (which itself took a painfully long time to load) and found the hard disk response times to be in the hundreds of thousands of milliseconds – normally, disk response times are under 100ms unless under heavy load. When response times are this high, it’s a good indicator that something is very wrong, and my first instinct was that my hard drive has just started to fail. Sure enough, I powered cycled the system and could no longer boot into Windows and instead received an error – 0xc00000e9: An unexpected I/o Error has occurred. Trying safe mode produced the same error message. Ugh.
Normally, to recover files from a failing drive that still has its filesystem intact, I would pull the drive, hook it up to a working system, and start copying files, skipping over files and directories that I didn’t need or that produced IO errors. With this drive, things were a bit different. The drive is Bitlocker enabled, which meant that in ordre to retrieve files, the drive needed to be unlocked or decrypted on a Bitlocker-aware system (i.e. one with Windows 7), using the Bitlocker recovery key to decrypt the data.
The good news is that I didn’t have anything important on the drive that wasn’t backed up, so I wasn’t desperate to recover its contents. But this was the first failed Bitlocker-enabled drive I’d encountered, and I thought it was a great opportunity to experiment to see how data on an encrypted drive can be recovered. It turns out that this can be a bit challenging on a failing drive where the success of IO operations isn’t always consistent, but it’s certainly possible to do.
Using the Explorer GUI
After removing the dying drive from the laptop, I connected it to another Windows 7 workstation using a USB-to-SATA adapter. The drive appeared in My Computer and even had the “Lock” icon next to it, indicating that it was a BitLocker drive:
Double-clicking the drive icon in My Computer launched Wizard to unlock/decrypt the drive, which then prompted me to enter my BitLocker recovery key (if you don’t have this, I think you’re screwed).
I proceeded to enter the key and hit Next. At that point, the interface stopped responding and I was unable to kill the process through task manager, or even by initiating a system restart. Disconnecting the drive didn’t help either. Eventually, I used the power button on the workstation to power cycle the system. After the power cycle, I tried again and encountered the same behavior. At this point, it seemed like the failing drive was too damaged to use this method, so I went searching for other ways that I might unlock or decrypt the drive.
Manage-bde
After some searching, I found the Windows command line utility, Manage-bde. Among other things, this utility can be used to unlock a Bitlocker drive. To do so, I launched PowerShell with administrative rights and enterred the following command:
Unfortunately, when I went to access the drive from My Computer, explorer froze and the contents of the root folder never appeared. Once again, it took a power cycle to get things working correctly. Why might this be? My guess is that there is a kernel-mode driver that’s used when mounting Bitlocker drives and doesn’t handle disk read timeouts very well, but I didn’t go into any in-depth debugging to confirm this. After all, strange things are expected to happen when a drive begins to fail.
Repair-bde
Since Manage-bde failed, I decided to try another command line utility for Bitlocker disks, Repair-bde. Unlike Manage-bde, Repair-bde appears to be specifically designed for accessing data from a damaged Bitlocker disk:
Accesses encrypted data on a severely damaged hard disk if the drive was encrypted by using BitLocker. Repair-bde can reconstruct critical parts of the drive and salvage recoverable data as long as a valid recovery password or recovery key is used to decrypt the data.
Unlike Manage-bde, the Repair-bde utility does not include a command to unlock the drive. Instead, the contents of the drive are sequentially decrypted and copied to a separate volume or image. you can also write the decrypted contents back to the source disk itself, but this is definitely not recommended if the drive is damaged and/or failing. Below is the Repair-bde command I used:
At first, this looked like it was going to work. The drive decryption process proceeded at a steady rate until it reached 17%, where the reads began to fail. With this particular drive, the read timeouts were excessive, taking 2+ minutes for each failed read to timeout. I tried changing the disk timeout, but the read timeout performance did not improve. Although I couldn’t find any definitive answers through online research, it seems like many SATA drives have have a firmware-based timeout. It turns out that some hard disk drives enforce a timeout in their firmware. In some cases, the firmware timeout can be adjusted (possibly through the ERC/TLER/CCTL setting?). For this disk, it wasn’t possible.
I let repair-bde run overnight, but the next morning it was still at 17%. Since I had no idea how many bad or unreadable sectors were on the disk, I imagine it would have taken weeks to complete at this pace. It would be ideal if Repair-bde could skip over sections of the disk, but I could not find an option for doing so.
RIPLinux and ddrescue
At this point, I decided it was time to change my strategy. The main problem was that disk timeouts were making it impossible to recover data using Repair-bde, and were probably factoring into to the issues I had when unlocking the drive with Manage-bde. I reasoned that, if I could capture recoverable parts of the disk into an image, I should be able to mount it in Windows and then unlock it. I started looking at ways to capture the raw (encrypted) data from the disk. I came across a wiki page that contained information about a Linux distribution called RIPLinux, which included a tool named ddrescue. Ddrescue performs a sector-by-sector copy of a disk. This is something that many other imaging utilities are capable of doing. However, ddrescue is much more resilient. Where other imaging tools will choke and die on bad sectors (*cough* Ghost), ddrescue gracefully recovers from an encounter with an unreadable sector, and skips ahead to another group of sectors. After an initial pass, it can then go back and retry the skipped sectors in smaller groups, maximizing the amount data that is recovered. The more passes performed, the more data retrieved (and the more time it takes to run – days or even weeks depending on state of the drive). Even better, ddrescue is restartable. If your capture is interrupted, simply type the same command as before (pointing to the associated ddrescue log), and it picks up right where it left off.
In brief, here are the steps you can follow to use this tool:
Connect an empty USB drive (it will be formatted), launch Universal USB Installer, select RIPLinux as the distribution, browse to the RIPLinux ISO you downloaded, then click Create
Connect the bad drive, and an empty good drive of equal or greater size to your “recovery system” and boot from the USB drive or CD containing RIP Linux.
At the login prompt, type ‘root’ and press enter. You’ll need to identify and drives now, which is arguably the most difficult part of this process if you’re a Linux novice.
At the shell prompt, type: fdisk -l
Identify and write down the device names for the bad drive and the good drive based on output of fdisk – l. For example, the first disk is usually /dev/sda and the second disk might be /dev/sdb. Ignore the partition names (i.e. /dev/sda1), if there are any. Tip: To scroll up and down in the console: Shift + Page Up and Shift + Page Dn
Check, double check. It is very important that you correctly identify these disks! Getting them mixed up could mean accidentally overwriting data on the bad drive! If you’re unsure, you can use the parted -l command, which lists the model of each drive in addition to its partitions.
Run ddrescue:
ddrescue /bad/drive /good/drive rescue.log -r -1 -a 10000 -d
-r -1 = Retry infinity times -a 10000 = Sets minimum read rate to 10,000 bytes. If the read rate goes below this, ddrescue will skip ahead a variable amount, and mark that area for retry on the next pass (if you choose to do one) -d = Use direct disk access
There are many other options, so feel free to change things up a bit.
Wait for ddrescue to complete a pass – this will take a while. After the pass completes, you can see how much data ddrescue has recovered. If you’re satisfied, you might stop here. Otherwise, you can perform another pass, and ddrescue will try to recover as much of the parts it skipped over as possible. The more passes run, the more data that should be recovered – though the returns will usually be lower with each pass.
With ddrescue finished, connect the good drive to a Windows 7 system. If all goes well, Windows should detect that the drive is BitLocker-encrypted, and you should be able to unlock it by double clicking the drive in My Computer and supplying your recovery key. You can also try the repair-bde commands mentioned above if this doesn’t work.
Achievement Unlocked.
If you’d prefer to write the recovered contents of the disk to a disk image, you can do that. In fact, that’s actually what I did in my case so that I could also write the ddrescue log file to the same disk and transfer the image to other storage. To do so, there’s a few Linux-specific commands involved. I forgot to save the specific commands (doh!), but here are the general steps:
Format the good drive with the Linux EXT3 filesystem, then mount it. I originally tried to write the image to an NTFS-formatted drive, but the Linux NTFS driver was slow and maxed out the CPU when I tried it initially – it doesn’t handle writing to large sparse files very well.
Run ddrescue, pointing to a non-existent file on the mounted drive. For example:
ddrescue /dev/sdc /mnt/sdb1/disk.img /mnt/sdb1/rescue.log -r -1 -a 10000 -d --extend-outfile=150G
After ddrescue runs, mount the good drive on a Windows 7 system. Since Windows doesn’t recognize EXT filesystems natively, you’ll need to grab Ext2Fsd to mount it.
Use VHD tool to convert the the raw disk image to a VHD.
Mount the VHD using Diskpart. From a command prompt, type Diskpart.exe to run diskpart, then run these commands:
If everything worked, the drive should appear in My Computer and you can unlock it and recover your files.
Other Thoughts
I prefer to remove failing drives from their enclosure and either place a fan on them or put them in a cooler with ice to keep them cool. A hot failing drive is bad. Obviously, if you put the drive on ice, be sure to come up with a way to keep it dry. A wet failing drive is bad.
You may have heard that putting drives in the freezer overnight can sometimes revive them just long enough. This may be true, but in my case it wasn’t. It’s probably moot if you’re trying to capture an image of the entire drive, since the drive won’t stay cool long enough to complete the image capture. It might work better if you could keep the drive in the freezer while recovering data, but I’ve never tried this.
Remember, when you’re working on any failing drive, you’re on borrowed time. Chances are good that the drive’s health will continue to deteriorate, so get as much data as you can, then get out. In many cases, it makes sense to capture the contents of the drive with something like ddrescue BEFORE trying any of the other methods, in case the drive becomes completely unresponsive to IO requests during subsequent recovery attempts or additional sectors go bad.
I would not run chkdsk /r on a failing drive, or use any software that will attempt to write to the drive. Writing to a failing drive = bad.
RIPLinux and Ddrescue are fantastic tools to have in your data recovery arsenal, and proved crucial in the recovery of data from my dying BitLocker drive. It is not a substitute for backing up your data, but you already knew that. Hopefully, this writeup will be useful to others that need to rescue their data!
When it comes to implementing power saving settings on managed workstations, the easy part is configuring the power management settings themselves. The hard part is ensuring that the systems remain consistently managed and maintained. Once standby settings are configured in Windows Power Management, idle workstations are likely to enter standby overnight, which is great way for conserving energy. But the evening hours are also an ideal time to deploy software and updates, because it’s less disruptive to employees that use these workstations throughout the day. How do you balance power savings, maintenance, and the end user experience on these systems?
Well, some people will tell you that Wake-on-LAN (WoL) is the solution. It’s true that, with WoL, you should be able to wake machines overnight to perform tasks — in theory at least. I say in theory because, any sysadmin that has tried to use WoL to wake and manage many workstations (100+) over multiple subnets will tell you that Wake-on-LAN is no magic bullet. There are several reasons for this:
To wake up a workstation with Wake-on-LAN, the workstation’s network adapter must be properly configured to receive WoL’s Magic Packets (trust me, these packets are much less magical than their name implies). This can be a lot more difficult than it sounds, especially if you need to script these settings for automated configuration.
In most environments, WoL packets will not work across subnets, so you need at least one device on each subnet that can send WoL packets. You’ll also need some sort of mechanism (usually software) to tell sender devices to send packets on their subnet to wake them up.
Many wireless network adapters do not support WoL, and the ones that do tend to have inconsistent results with receiving WoL packets. If you have workstations that only connect to the network via wireless, this is a problem.
If the workstation is disconnected from the LAN, the WoL packet won’t make it.
Scheduled Wakeups
WoL is very useful for many situations, especially for impromptu wakeups. But if you want your workstations to wake from standby at night, or any time, you may not want to depend soley on WoL. What you really need is something that tells Windows to resume from standby on a schedule. But how? Well, Microsoft Windows actually includes the capability to resume from standby at certain times. This functionality is a part of the Task Scheduler service, and it can be enabled by simply clicking a check box:
With the “Wake the computer to run this task” checkbox set on a scheduled task, the system will resume from standby at whatever time interval has been configured on the Triggers tab. It is important to note, however, that this won’t work if the system is completely powered off.
The next question is, what should the task do once it has woken up the system? The answer is, just about anything. For example, it could run a script that starts Windows Update, run a virus scan, or start a backup. If you can script it or call it from the command line, you can do it. Here’s a simple example of how you might keep the system awake for at ~10 minutes by using the ping command:
Scripting Wakeups
Alright, we can use a scheduled task to wake workstations. That’s great, but not very useful unless we can use a script to automate the creation of a task that does this. As you may already know, a scheduled task can be created with the command line utility: SCHTASKS.EXE. This is a relatively powerful utility for creating tasks, and once you understand all of the command line options, creating a task with this utility is fairly straightforward:
Unfortunately, it appears as though there’s no way to set “Wake the computer to run this task” via SCHTASKS. However, Windows Vista and 7 come with a robust Task Scheduler API that can configure this setting. I wrote a VB script that does just that:
' Name: ScheduledTaskSetWakeToRun.vbs
' Author: Matthew Boyd (iboyd.net)
' Date: 10/13/2010
' Purpose: Enables or disables the "Wake the computer to run this task" setting on Windows Vista and Windows 7 systems.
' It seems that in order to do this successfully, both in the GUI or via this script,the task compatibility
' mode must be set to "2.0" or else the setting gets reverted.
' Usage: cscript.exe ScheduledTaskSetWakeToRun.vbs "" [enable | disable]
' Example: cscript.exe ScheduledTaskSetWakeToRun.vbs "My Scheduled Task" enable
' The command above would set "Wake the computer to run this task" to enabled.
Option Explicit
Const TASK_UPDATE = &H4
Const TASK_DONT_ADD_PRINCIPAL_ACE = &H10
Dim TaskName, EnableWakeToRun, objTaskService, objRootFolder, objTask, objDefinition
If Wscript.Arguments.Count < 1 Then
Err.Raise 1, "Invalid command line arguments!"
Else
TaskName = Wscript.Arguments.Item(0)
End If
Wscript.echo "Task Name: " & TaskName
If Wscript.Arguments.Count < 2 Then 'Set EnableWakeToRun to true by default if enable/disable was not specified.
EnableWakeToRun = true
wscript.echo "Action: ENABLE 'Wake the computer to run this task'"
ElseIf UCase(Wscript.Arguments.Item(1)) = "ENABLE" Then
wscript.echo "Action: ENABLE 'Wake the computer to run this task'"
EnableWakeToRun = true
Else
wscript.echo "Action: DISABLE 'Wake the computer to run this task'"
EnableWakeToRun = false
End If
Set objTaskService = CreateObject("Schedule.Service")
objTaskService.Connect
Set objRootFolder = objTaskService.GetFolder("\")
Set objTask = objRootFolder.GetTask ("\" & TaskName)
Set objDefinition = objTask.Definition
wscript.echo "Current WakeToRun Setting: " & CStr(objDefinition.Settings.WakeToRun)
wscript.echo "Current Compatibility Setting: " & objDefinition.Settings.Compatibility
wscript.echo "---"
objDefinition.Settings.WakeToRun = EnableWakeToRun
objDefinition.Settings.Compatibility = 2
objRootFolder.RegisterTaskDefinition objTask.Name, objDefinition, TASK_UPDATE or TASK_DONT_ADD_PRINCIPAL_ACE, , , objDefinition.Principal.LogonType
Set objTaskService = CreateObject("Schedule.Service")
objTaskService.Connect
Set objRootFolder = objTaskService.GetFolder("\")
Set objTask = objRootFolder.GetTask (TaskName)
wscript.echo "New WakeToRun Setting: " & CStr(objTask.Definition.Settings.WakeToRun)
wscript.echo "New Compatibility Setting: " & objDefinition.Settings.Compatibility
To use this script, create a task first by using SCHTASKS. Then, run a command similar to this:
cscript.exe ScheduledTaskSetWakeToRun.vbs "My Scheduled Task" enable
The script will output both the previous and new values of the “WakeToRun” setting. You can verify that it worked by opening the Task Scheduler GUI and verifying that “Wake the computer to run this task” is set. This script can also be used to disable this setting.
You may also notice that the code in this script sets the “task compatibility mode” version to 2. I found issues with tasks that were using a different compatibility mode. It seems that “Wake the computer to run this task” would always be reverted, even if it was set through the Task Scheduler GUI. I believe the only disadvantage to changing the compatibility mode is that the task will not be backwards compatible with Windows XP.
By using a combination of Wake-on-LAN and scheduled wakeups, it’s much easier to successfully manage and maintain workstations in standby with better precision and accuracy. Also, by performing maintenance tasks overnight, you can keep workstations reliable without impacting the end user. It’s a win-win situation!
Recently, I encountered a strange issue after adding ATI Catalyst 10.4 Display Drivers to an offline Windows 7 image using the DISM.EXE /Add-Driver command. On systems that had an ATI Radeon video card, a UAC prompt would pop up the first time a user logged on and got to the desktop:
As I’ve mentioned before, putting workstations into a low power standby mode when not in use is a great way to save money. Unfortunately, standby doesn’t always work like it should. Many sysadmins have struggled with applications, settings, and even system drivers that prevent standby from working reliably, or working at all.
There were many scenarios in past versions of Windows where workstations configured to enter standby after a certain period of idle time would refuse to do so, often without many clues as to why. This behavior is commonly (and cleverly) referred to as PC insomnia. While Windows 7 computers can still suffer from insomnia, the latest Windows OS now includes new tools and settings to troubleshoot and resolve it. There are a variety of things that may prevent a computer from properly entering standby when idle. Common reasons include hardware driver issues, service issues, and open file shares. Windows XP did not include any tools that could help pinpoint what was keeping the system awake, which often made finding the culprit a guessing game. Thankfully, the command line utility POWERCFG.EXE was updated in Windows 7 to include two new options that assist with tracking down insomnia issues.
If you haven’t already, you should check out my previous article about power management in Windows 7 in order to learn about power profiles and POWERCFG.EXE commands.
POWERCFG -REQUESTS
One way to troubleshoot Windows 7 insomnia issues, is the POWERCFG.EXE -REQUESTS command. This command can be used to display a list of applications and drivers that have made requests to prevent the computer from entering standby.
In the example above, there are actually two Windows components that are preventing the system from entering standby. The first issue is that Windows wants to keep this particular computer awake because a remote host is connected to a share on the computer . If this computer was acting as a network file server, that would probably be a good thing. But it’s not, so we either need to prevent the computer from sharing files at all, or allow it to enter standby regardless of whether a remote host is connected to a file share. The other issue is that Windows wants to keep this computer awake because it’s connected to a remote file share. While there are probably cases where this behavior is desired, I want Windows to enter standby regardless of whether or not the computer is connected to a remote network share. Otherwise, most workstations would never enter standby! Both of these issues can normally resolved by changing a few hidden power options, which is covered later in this article.
POWERCFG -ENERGY
In a some cases, it may also be useful run POWERCFG.EXE -ENERGY. This command performs a more thorough investigation in order find potential power management issues, such as those that may be preventing standby. When POWERCFG -ENERGY is run, it detects common issues by monitoring the system for a period of time and capturing system settings and events that may be preventing Windows power management from working properly. When done, the results are written to a HTML file.
By default, POWERCFG.EXE -ENERGY analyzes the system for 60 seconds. However, the analysis duration can be be set to a larger period of time to detect more sporadic events that are preventing standby. To perform an analysis for 10 minutes, run POWERCFG -ENERGY -DURATION 600. When finished, the results are written to energy-report.html, or the filename specified with -OUTPUT <FILENAME>.
While this report is more thorough that POWERCFG -REQUESTS, it may include items that aren’t necessarily related to issues with standby. For example, the report above shows the error USB Suspend:USB Device not Entering Suspend for several USB devices on this computer. While this may affect the computer’s power efficiency at some level, it’s not the reason that this computer was entering standby. In this case, the standby was being blocked by the System Required Request initiated by the driver \FileSystem\srvnet. This is related to the Windows network shares, and indicated to me that that standby was being blocked because a remote host was trying to connect to a share on the client computer. I wasn’t able to see this when running POWERCFG -REQUESTS alone.
Manually Checking Services
If neither of the tools mentioned above help pinpointthe cause of insomnia, you may want to try manually verifying that Windows Services aren’t preventing standby. This troubleshooting method is simple, but a bit tedious:
First, go to Start > Control Panel > Power Options and configure the current power profile so that the system enters standby after 1 minute.
Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services. Sort the services by the status column.
One by one, stop services that are running. Each time you stop a service, let the computer idle for at least 2 minutes to see if it enters standby. Continue doing this until the computer enters standby. It’s probably best to begin with non-Windows services.
If/when the computer finally enters standby after you’ve stopped a service, make note of that service. Restart the computer so that all services are running again. Stop that particular service again and wait for the computer to idle into standby.
If the computer idles to standby, you have found the service that is preventing system standby.
What services could be causing insomnia? Some anti-virus applications have been known to prevent the system from entering standby for various reasons. Older or poorly-written services may also be the cause of PC insomnia.
Treating Insomnia
Windows 7 includes several power settings that may be useful for resolving PC insomnia. Interestingly, some of them are hidden and must be enabled in the system registry. Below are some common settings and methods for treating insomnia.
Allow Standby with Remote Opens
By default, Windows 7 will attempt to prevent system standby when connected to a a remote share or file. Presumably, this is to prevent any ongoing file transfers over the network from failing due to the system unexpectedly entering standby. But there are many cases where the system is connected to a remote share and it is okay to enter standby. Windows 7 includes a setting to allow the computer to enter standby, but it may be missing from the advanced power options dialog box. This .reg file will unhide the “Allow sleep with remote opens” option AND set it to Yes for three default power profiles (Balanced, High Performance, and Power Saver) in Windows 7:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\d4c1d4c8-d5cc-43d3-b83e-fc51215cb04d]
"Attributes"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\d4c1d4c8-d5cc-43d3-b83e-fc51215cb04d\DefaultPowerSchemeValues\381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e]
"ACSettingIndex"=dword:00000001
"DCSettingIndex"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\d4c1d4c8-d5cc-43d3-b83e-fc51215cb04d\DefaultPowerSchemeValues\8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c]
"ACSettingIndex"=dword:00000001
"DCSettingIndex"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\d4c1d4c8-d5cc-43d3-b83e-fc51215cb04d\DefaultPowerSchemeValues\a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a]
"ACSettingIndex"=dword:00000001
"DCSettingIndex"=dword:00000001
Although the registry entries above will configure the three default power profiles, it won’t apply the settings to custom power profiles. To do that, you’ll need to find the Power Scheme GUID of the power profile you created by using POWERCFG.EXE /LIST and then run these commands:
If the system is configured with file or media sharing enabled, Windows 7 may prevent the system from entering standby while users are connected to files or shares hosted on the system in order to prevent file transfers from being interrupted. Sometimes, media, file, and printer sharing may be enabled on the workstation without the user or the sysadmin knowing it. To make matters worse, there are some network applications installed that tend to scan network shares at regular intervals, which may prevent standby.
This behavior can be disabled by setting “When sharing media” to “Allow Computer to Sleep” within the advanced settings of a power profile. The setting shouldn’t be hidden by default. To apply this setting to a custom Windows 7 power profile, these commands can be used:
While applications can request that Windows to keep the system awake, that doesn’t mean that the OS should always listen. Applications make power requests like this for several reasons. For example, Windows Update may make a request keep to computer awake while updates are being installed or a reboot is pending. It’s actually very easy to implement a power request that blocks standby, which means it could be abused by a service or process that thinks it knows what’s good for it. If the results from POWERCFG -REQUESTS or POWERCONFIG -ENERGY show that a particular service or process is making a lot of unnecessary power requests, there is a way in Windows 7 to ignore those requests. To learn more about overriding a power requests, browse to the “Overriding a Power Request” section of this Microsoft paper.
Don’t Allow System Required Policy
If you’ve tried everything but still can’t get that insomniac system to enter standby when idle, there is one last setting that you can use in a last ditch attempt.
However,the “Allow System Required Policy” power setting may also cause Windows to ignore valid requests to keep the computer awake. Therefore, this setting should only be used if nothing else works and you’ve tried using a Power Request Override to ignore specific drivers, processes, and services. This registry entry will unhide the setting:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\A4B195F5-8225-47D8-8012-9D41369786E2]
"Attributes"=dword:00000000
To disable power request overrides for a power profile, these commands can be used:
Another common issue with Windows systems that enter standby is PC Narcolepsy. PC Narcolepsy refers to a behavior of the Windows Operating System, where a computer that resumes standby from a Wake-on-LAN (WOL) or scheduled wakeup event will enter standby again after 2 minutes unless there is user interaction, such as pressing a key on the mouse or keyboard. In Windows XP, there wasn’t any way to change this behavior. Fortunately, Windows 7 introduces a new power option that can change the amount of time that the computer resumes from standby: System unattended sleep timeout. However this setting is hidden in the power profile by default. Why is it hidden? I’m not quite sure. Perhaps because it could be confused with the standby timeout setting. It can be unhidden using this reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0]
"Attributes"=dword:00000000
Once unhidden, this setting will be visible in the advanced power options dialog. However, most sysadmins need a way to automate the configuration of this setting. Like several of the settings above, this can be done if you know the GUID of the power profile that you want to set this setting on:
POWERCFG.EXE /SETACVALUEINDEX <POWER SCHEME GUID> 238c9fa8-0aad-41ed-83f4-97be242c8f20 7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0 <DURATION IN SECONDS>
POWERCFG.EXE /SETDCVALUEINDEX <POWER SCHEME GUID> 238c9fa8-0aad-41ed-83f4-97be242c8f20 7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0 <DURATION IN SECONDS>
Between Windows XP and Windows 7, Microsoft made significant changes under the hood to power management in order to make Windows a more energy efficient OS. While Windows Vista included a significant number of changes to power management, it really seems like Microsoft put much more effort into making Windows 7 more power efficient after complaints about terrible battery life with Windows Vista. This PDF provides a general overview of these changes. Many of the changes work out of the box, which is great for overworked sysadmins. However, there are a few settings that need to be configured as needed, particularly when it comes to system idle and standby settings. With Windows 7, Microsoft has included several additional features and troubleshooting tools that address some of the headaches caused by power management in Windows XP.
Standby Me
Before we dive into the guts of power management in Windows 7, let’s discuss the value of taking the time to configure power management settings. Since going green is a hot trend right now, many companies are starting to put pressure on sysadmins to find ways to squeeze power savings from a major offender to the energy grid: Computers. At many companies, workstations are left running 24×7, even when not in use. If the work week is only 40 hours, that means that many of these computers are in a Powered On with Nothing to Do (POND) state for 100+ hours per week. As Ford recently discovered, turning computers off when they are not in use is a great way to reduce energy waste and save some serious coin!
One disadvantage to turning off computers completely when not in use is that, when a user needs to use the computer again, they have to wait for the computer to start up, then log in, then load applications and documents again. Admittedly, this a bit time consuming and frustrating for an end user. Therefore, many sysadmins opt to put computers into a low power standby mode as a fair compromise between user experience and energy savings. Standby mode, which powers down most system components as suspends the system state to RAM, allows the user instantly resume where they left off when they last used the computer. In modern computers, standby only consumes slightly more power than when in a powered off state.
Applying Settings with POWERCFG
If you’ve used the POWERCFG utility in Windows XP, you’ll probably find one major difference in Windows 7: GUIDs. In Windows XP, a power scheme could be configured by specifying the name of the scheme in the POWERCFG command line syntax. In Windows 7, that is no longer an option. Instead, you must specify the GUID associated with a particular power scheme when configuring and activating a scheme. While POWERCFG in Windows 7 still includes a way to change the monitor, disk, and standby timeouts of the active scheme, it takes some understanding of the Windows 7 power management GUIDs to do anything beyond that. Not only are the power schemes themselves identified by GUIDs, Windows 7 uses GUIDs to uniquely identify settings and groups of settings as well. While the idea of working with GUIDs may seem like a daunting task, it’s actually pretty easy to wrap your head around once you know how to find and use these GUIDs.
The most straightforward way to get a list of power scheme, group, and setting GUIDs is to run POWERCFG -QUERY. As a side note, this command tends to generate a lot of output, so it may be wise to pipe the output to a file like this:
POWERCFG.EXE -QUERY > powercfg.txt
After running the command, the current directory should contain the powercfg.txt file with the output from POWERCFG – QUERY inside of it. Here’s what it looks like:
As you can see from the example above, POWERCFG -QUERY provides very detailed information about every power scheme and setting set in power options in a nicely indented format. At the top is the GUID associated with the power scheme (High Performance). Directly below that is the GUID that identifies the first subgroup of settings (settings belonging to no subgroup). The GUIDs that identify each setting are directly below that, with information about possible setting values.
Example
Let’s say we wanted to change the setting Require a Password on Wakeup to No within the High Performance power scheme. First, we need to use the output from POWERCFG -QUERY to find the associated GUIDs and setting index:
These values are then plugged into commands POWERCFG -SETACVALUEINDEX and POWERCFG -SETDCVALUEINDEX:
As you may have guessed, the first command affects the computer while it’s plugged in. The second affects the computer while on battery. There’s a few things that have been implied in this example, but are worth covering in case you plan to script power settings for a fleet of computers:
Windows includes three built-in power schemes: Balanced, High Performance, and Power Saver. These schemes are identified by the same GUID on every Windows 7 computer.
The GUIDs that identify subgroups and power settings are the same on every Windows 7 computer.
Go to Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows features on or off
In the treeview, go to Remote Server Administration Tools -> Role Administration Tools -> AD DS and AD LDS Tools and select AD DS Tools. Click OK.
NETDOM should be located in your SYSTEM32 folder. If would rather use Powershell to join the domain, since it’s included with the Windows 7 RTM, then please continue reading. I apologize for any confusion.
(Begin Original Post)
Now that the title of this post has your attention, I can tell you that Windows 7 isn’t really missing this important tool that joins a machine to an Active Directory Domain in an automated fashion. Instead, this command-line utility has been superseded by a new command that’s included in Microsoft’s love-it-or-hate-it command line shell: Windows Powershell. Why? Well, Powershell is certainly more powerful than the standard command prompt. But more importantly, Windows 7 is the first version to include Windows Powershell in the RTM build. With Powershell built into Windows 7, perhaps Microsoft saw no reason to continue including and supporting our old pal, NETDOM.
Joining a Domain with Add-Computer
When you’re finished grieving over the loss of our beloved NETDOM, which has joined countless computers to countless Windows Domains (or far inferior Workgroups), it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start working with the successor command: Add-Computer. This command will only run in a Windows Powershell command prompt. The good news, however, is that you can easily run Add-Computer inside Powershell through a normal command prompt (or batch file). To do so, open a command prompt (with elevated privileges) and run this command:
powershell Add-Computer -DomainName "YOURDOMAIN"
See? That wasn’t so bad now was it? If you don’t mind entering credentials to join the domain on every single computer, that’s all you need. But unfortunately, some of us need to automate the process of joining the domain. For that, it gets more complex, and we’ll need a bit more Powershell to make it work.
Screenshot: Add-Computer -?
How to Use Add-Computer
From a command prompt, you can get more detailed usage instructions for Add-Computer by using this command:
powershell Add-Computer -?
In the syntax section, you’ll find syntax switches that can be used to specify the domain name, OU path, and credentials. For a more details and examples on Add-Computer, you can also use this command:
powershell get-help Add-Computer -detailed
The first thing you should notice is that, unlike NETDOM, there aren’t syntax switches to specify the username and password. Instead, there is a switch called “-Credential” that takes in a PSCredential object. Therefore, we need to create a PSCredential object with the credentials that will be used to join the computer to the domain before we can actually use the Add-Computer command in an automated way. To do this, we’ll need to create a Powershell script.
If you have never used Powershell before, you’ll probably say to yourself, “PSCredential object? What is that!?” I’ll give you this very brief explanation: PSCredential is an object that can securely store Windows credentials. Furthermore, Powershell is more like full-blown Object-Oriented scripting language than a shell language. Like DOS, it has a command prompt. However, the differences usually end there. Anyway, this article isn’t about Powershell, but if you want to know more about it, start Googling. Or you can just continue on to get the Powershell script.
A Powershell Script to Join the Domain
The Powershell script needed to join the domain contains only two commands. Create a new text file named “joinDomain.ps1″ and put the following powershell code into it:
The first line of the script creates a new System.Management.Automation.PsCredential object. PsCredential takes in two parameters: a string containing a username and a secure string containing the password. You should change “MY.DOMAIN.COM\user” to the user that will join the computer to the domain. Change “mypassword” to the password of that account.
The second line is the Add-Computer command. “MY.DOMAIN.COM” should be changed to the domain that the computer is joining. Change OUPath to the OU String that points to the OU container that the computer object should be placed in.
Running the Script
To run the Powershell script above, you need to open an elevated command prompt. To run it, type powershell ./joinDomain.ps1 and press enter. In many cases, you will find that you’re not allowed to run the script, despite running the command as an administrator:
>powershell ./joinDomain.ps1
File joinDomain.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see "get-help about_signing" for more details.
The funny part about Powershell is that, by default, it is configured to only allow the execution of signed scripts. This is a security feature so that unauthorized or malicious scripts that could compromise the system can’t be executed. After all, Powershell is quite power-ful. Unfortunately, this really tends to confuse and frustrate people. To get around this, you can temporarily change the execution policy, and then change it back:
You can also change the execution policy to allow only signed scripts and scripts created by you. For more information about the Powershell execution policy, check out this article.
Final Thoughts
Now that you are able to automate a domain join with Powershell instead of NETDOM, there is one final thing that I want to mention. In the script above, the password String was converted to a SecureString by using the “-AsPlainText -Force” arguments. Using SecureString in this way is generally discouraged as it defeats the whole purpose of having a secure string. Furthermore, having account credentials in plain text with in the script is insecure and generally a bad idea. I’m guessing that this is the reason why Microsoft left out the “/userD” and “/passwordD” parameters from the NETDOM command and made it more slightly difficult to include the credentials in plain text. You should limit the rights of the account you’re using to automatically join the domain so that it cannot be used to delete Active Directory objects, access network shares, etc. You should also consider other methods of storing the credentials. This article has an alternative method for storing credentials used in Powershell that may meet your needs.
Since I maintain the Windows XP Image for our lab machines, I was tasked with doing the same thing with Windows 7. When I rewrote our imaging tools last Spring, I created a WinPE 2.0 image that included the WMI package so that the imaging application could perform WMI queries in PE. I used WMI only to get basic information about the machine (Such as the Manufacturer, Model, Serial Number, and Disk Information).
While upgrading the WinPE image from 2.0 to 3.0 in anticipation of deploying Windows 7, I discovered that the Windows PE 3.0 base image (the same one that comes with the Windows AIK) was missing Win32_DiskPartition. I use this class to retrieve the number of partitions on the system disk so that I can make sure that each partitition (and its volume) has been assigned a drive letter so that I can search each drive for a preexisting configuration file. But why would Microsoft remove this class!? On a standard Windows 7 machine, the command “WMIC.EXE PARTITION” returned a list of partitions on the system, confirming that I wasn’t losing my mind. However, the command returned nothing when I tried it in Windows PE 3.0.
After lots of searching, I finally came across a post on Microsoft Technet where another developer ran into the same issue. Fortunately, he found a simple, but somewhat obscure, solution:
On a fully-installed Windows 7 machine, copy the contents of C:\Windows\System32\wbem
Mount the Windows PE 3.0 image and replace the contents of <mountdir>\Windows\System32\wbem with the wbem folder from the previous step
Using the Windows 7 wbem folder in your WinPE 3.0 image will make it several Megabytes larger, but at least you will be able to get to the missing WMI class(es) that you need!
Update 3/11/2010: After upgrading to the latest version of the Microsoft WAIK, I was unable to overwrite existing files in the WBEM folder (Access Denied). For some reason, the permissions are different on this folder now. Here is the workaround:
To take ownership of the existing WBEM folder and files, run this command: TAKEOWN /F <mountdir>\windows\system32\wbem /A /R
To grant administrators full control of the existing WBEM folder and files, run this command: ICACLS <mountdir>\windows\system32\wbem /grant Administrators:F /T
Once the permissions are updated, you will be able to overwrite files in the WBEM folder.
Update 3/18/2011: I was hoping that this issue would be resolved with the release of Windows 7 SPI and WinPE 3.1. Unfortunately, the problem still exists. However, I did some additional digging and found that, for me at least, there is only one file that I need to copy to the WinPE WIM fix Win32_DiskPartition: C:\Windows\Sysm32\wbem\en-US\cimwin32.dll.mui. Since the file doesn’t exist already in a fresh WinPE WIM, should shouldn’t have to deal with the ownership and permission issues mentioned above.
Only a few days after the Release Candidate of Microsoft Windows 7 was released, I took the plunge and installed it on my primary laptop. Previously, I was running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and I was really disappointed in how sluggish the system felt, especially when entering or leaving hibernation. With little to lose except for a bit of time, I completely removed Vista and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7RC.Se
Setup and Configuration
If you’ve ever installed Windows Vista, the setup process for Windows 7 will be very familiar. While there are some minor aesthetic changes, the process appears to be mostly the same. However, one difference that you may have noticed is the spare 100-200MB partition in front of the system partion that setup creates automatically during a clean install. This partition is created so that Bitlocker can easily be activated later if the end user chooses to do so. As I will describe later, this makes enabling and configuring Bitlocker drive encryption very easy for the end user.
Once setup completed, I checked Device Manager to see what devices were missing drivers. For the most part, the Vista drivers for these devices worked fine. The Lenovow website did not have a working driver for the fingerprint reader, but I managed to find a beta version through the hardware manufacturer website. Overall, the install process was relatively painless.
Interface Changes
Clearly, Microsoft focused on the interface in this version of Windows. The first difference that most users are likely to notice is that the task bar has received a major overhaul. Open application windows are all grouped under a single icon in the task bar, and the title of each window is no longer displayed. Surprisingly, this isn’t a bad thing thanks to the new behavior of task bar icons. For example, hover over an application icon, and thumbnails of all open windows for that specific application are displayed above the task bar. If you then hover over one of those thumbnails, all other windows become transparent so that you can see the application window, courtesy of the new ‘Aero Peek’ feature. Right click on the icon and you are presented with additional application-specific options or items. For example, right clicking the Internet Explorer icon shows frequently visited sites, while right clicking the Remote Desktop Connection icon will show recent and pinned remote desktop connections.
Hovering over the very right side of the task bar sets open windows to transparent so the desktop is visible. Clicking the right side of the button minimizes open windows, just like the 'Show Desktop' icon in previous versions of Windows.
The ‘Show Desktop’ icon that was in the quick launch menu in previous versions of Windows is now a permanent, yet inconspicuous, part of the task bar. Clicking on the thin blank button on the right side of the task bar will minimize all open windows so that the desktop is visible. However, if you only need to see the desktop and would rather not minimize all open windows, you can hover over this area instead of clicking it so that windows are temporarily transparent.
I’m sure there will be users that will cringe at the idea of learning to use a new task bar with different behavior, especially since the former has been in use since Windows 95. However, after a few hours of using it, I’d imagine most users will be comfortable with the new features and concepts that this task bar introduces.In my opinion, it is significantly improved. In the long run, I think most users will be happy with this change and will have a hard time looking back.
Bitlocker is a Bit Better
Hard drive encryption has become a hot topic recently, especially in the realm of laptops and mobile devices. The implications of data loss or theft are far reaching and, depending on the industry, can result in a company receiving large fines, fiscal losses, negative public image. To defend against this, organizations have started to mandate hard disk encryption in order to prevent data from stolen or lost devices from being recovered by malicious third parties.
Turning the Bitlocker feature on and off in Windows 7 is very easy.
This time around, Microsoft did things right and pre-configured the hard disk partitions during setup to support Bitlocker encryption. Turning on Bitlocker is very easy in Windows 7 (assuming your computer has a Trusted Platform Module). Simply go to ‘Bitlocker Drive Encryption’ in the control panel and click ‘Turn on Bitlocker’. The wizard will go through the process of saving a recovery key and then proceed to reboot the system and configure the Trusted Platform Module. After booting, existing files on the hard drive are encrypted in the background. The machine is still usable during this process. The disk encryption process finished in about 2 hours on my laptop. Since encrypting the drive, I have noticed little performance impact. Even my battery life seems to have remained fairly consistent.
Intuitive Device Management
Not only was pairing my Windows Mobile phone easy, the Windows Mobile Device Center was automatically installed afterward.
Microsoft seems to have tried to streamline the administration and configuration of peripherals for the in Windows 7. A new area in the control panel, called Devices and Printers, allows users to quickly view and add device connections to their system. Previously with Windows Vista, I had inconsistent results establishing a Bluetooth connection with my Windows Mobile phone. Sometimes it would work great, but most of the time it took several tries to actually get the laptop and phone to pair and begin a sync. With Windows 7 RC, my experience was quite intuitive. From “Devices and Printers” in the control panel. I clicked ‘Add a device’ and selected my mobile phone, which Windows had automatically found. A pre-generated code was displayed to pair my phone. After entering the code on my phone, the pairing was complete and the phone appeared in the devices list. If that wasn’t easy enough, Windows 7 proceeded to detect that the phone was a Windows Mobile device and automatically began installed the Windows Mobile Device Center. Impressive.
There’s More
I’m continuing to find other new features and changes in Windows 7 that I really like. Some of these changes are more subtle than others, but the majority of them seem to share a common goal of making the interface more intuitive, responsive, and efficient to the end user. Even the minor changes to components, such as the Resource Monitor and the wireless connection task tray feel like great improvements when compared with previous versions of Windows. And to compliment all of this, Microsoft seems to have made no compromises in the areas of security, reliability, and performance. Microsoft really seems to be taking the shortcomings (both real and perceived) of Vista seriously. As for me, I am going to continue using the release candidate and look forward to the official release of Windows 7 at the end of this year.
The expressed opinions, informational content and links displayed on this website do not necessarily reflect a position or policy of The Pennsylvania State University or its affiliates.
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