Category Archives: Windows Server & Hyper-V

Print Spooler Failures

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We have been having trouble with print spooler failures with a Terminal Server Farm recently and I recently discovered a cool feature of the 2008R2 Printer Manager.

You can select a driver and set it to isolate which means the driver will have it’s own isolated virtual print spooler , This means it wont share the common print spooler and in the event of a buggy driver it wont pull the whole print spooler down , only the printer using that particular driver.

Remote Desktop Easy Print and a HP Universal Print Driver can act in similar ways and therefore can clash, witch would make sense to isolate each driver.

Its a really cool feature that not many people know about and can really help troubleshoot print spooler problems.

If your having trouble with a driver which is isolated , it will then have its own process and you can use Process Explorer from sysinternals to analyse that process.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

After installing Hyper-V Integration Services on the next reboot the VM displays BSOD 0x0000007B

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A big thanks to kev greene in cdsoft for this article which has proved to be priceless.

Recently, I had some customers with VMs they just P2V’ed, or even had them running already on Virtual Server or Hyper-V. Now, they installed the latest Integration Components that came with the R2 Release.

After the required reboot, the VM shows a Bluescreen 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

During Debugging I found that the Storage Driver of the ICs require the Windows Driver Framework (WDF), which was not loaded in this case. So the Storage Driver fails to load.
Looking into the Registry of the VM, shows that the WDF Driver was already installed previously, but had the wrong Group relationship, so it is initialized too late.

So here’s how to fix this issue:

1. Boot the VM into LastKnownGood. Press F8 during boot.
2. Open the Registry and drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Wdf01000
3. There is a Group Value that should have the Value WdfLoadGroup. In my cases it was wrongly set to base. Change this to WdfLoadGroup
4. Then remove the Integration Components from Control Panel/Software.
5. Reboot the VM (now without ICs)
6. Install the ICs once again