Troubleshooting ‘At least one service or driver failed during system startup’

You receive the following error message after Windows 2003 boots.

At least one service or driver failed during system startup.  Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details.

There is a  quite excellent article here on how to debug errors like this; http://networkadminkb.com/kb/Knowledge%20Base/Windows2003/Troubleshooting%20%91At%20least%20one%20service%20or%20driver%20failed%20during%20system%20startup%92.aspx

I found it while trying to find a way to surpress the dialog box, which sadly I did never find (one would think there would be some registry tweak that would disable this stupid dialogbox on a server where the error had no effect and was impossible to resolve)..

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W32Time issues on Win2003 server – and resolution

Had problems with a server that was complaining that it could not sync. time with the DC, it stated that it received invalid data amongst other.

Event ID 38, 47 and 29 – Source: W32Time
“The time provider NtpClient cannot reach or is currently receiving invalid time data from NTP_server_IP_Address.”

Found the resolution here;
http://www.chicagotech.net/troubleshooting/eventid47.htm

Basically (this worked for me);

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then press ENTER.
 
2. At the command prompt, type the following commands in the order that they are given. After you type each command, press ENTER.

• w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:<TIME SERVER IP, EG DC>,0x8 /syncfromflags:MANUAL
• net stop w32time
• net start w32time
• w32tm /resync

a few additional dos commands you may try when debugging w32time;
C:\>net time /querysntp
C:\>w32tm /resync
C:\>w32tm /monitor

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USB Safely remove + a whole lot more…

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Ever had problems ejecting a USB device – getting an errror like “Unable to stop….”?

Well this page claim to have a utility that can assist you with this issue plus a whole lot more (like renaming USB devices, ejecting USB via command line and hot-key eject)… Sounds very promising..

http://safelyremove.com

I found this by visiting an old post here on my site, a post about a file unlocking utility.

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Sparkle Sparkle little server

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http://www.sparkleshare.org/ is a new project on the Internet inspired by Dropbox (a clever fileshareing/collaboration and file syncronising util that uses cloud based storage), SparkleShares force is that it supposodly will be free/open source and you can thus setup your own servers, sounds like something to make a mantal note of..

The first version will be in Linux but should be followed by a windows version, presently no version is publicly available though (as it’s very early in the program, announced June 10th 2010).

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/06/sparkleshare-aims-to-better-dropbox.html

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Boot Windows faster with Soluto

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Soluto offers to minimize your boot time, even with Windows 7 boot time is time wasted and a spark for frustration but this utility states it can cut a significant portion of your boot time.

http://www.soluto.com/
They even call it “Anti-Fustration software” 🙂

I have not tested it yet, but it does sound promising.

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Free vulnerability/update scanners

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Hopefully you have your Windows machine set to receive updates automatically?  But do you ever check that updates are actually downloaded, and installed and what about third party software?

Well, this tip is an oldie, but still quite good and worth a mention;
Secunia (a very skilled security company) offer several products for evaluating your Software readiness (ranging from corporate products to free online personal scanners).
Check it out at (at the very least do an online scan);
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/online/

CNet also offers a new product called TechTracker which more or less does the same thing;
http://www.cnet.com/techtracker/?tag=mncol;pm

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BSD – Blue Screen of Death analyzer

Have you ever had a machine BSD (blue screen) on you?  and have you ever felt helpless in understanding why and what the problem is?

Well here is a Freeware product that can give you a little insight or at least give you ample time to read and analyze the BSD info.  It analyzes the minidump file that is generated on BSD..

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

If you have a SA agreement with MS as part of your license, then you have access to yet another utility via “Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance” Crash Analyzer Wizard..  But as mentioned this require a SA agreement.

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MXToolbox – Debug smtp and more online

If you need to debug mail flow problems then make sure to visit www.mxtoolbox.com, it will offer you some quite useful insights quite intuitively – including eg. Analyze headers, blacklist checking, mx checking and much much more.

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How to Enable, Disable and Maintain LCS (Live Communications Server) User Attributes using VBScript

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Just a quick link if you ever need to implement Microsoft Live Communications Server, here is a script that can assist you in modifying your AD users.

http://www.activedir.org/Articles/tabid/54/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/15/Default.aspx

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Windirstat – graphical overview of your harddisk usage

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I actually thought I had written this post long ago, but it would seem it somehow slipped my mind.

Anyhow, have you ever found yourself running out of diskspace – wandering what the h… is eating up all your diskspace… most have and it can be a complex matter to find that strange .zip or .log file (or whatnot file) that is floating around somewhere and taking up hundreds if not thousands of megabytes.

The solution is a cool freeware util Windirstat that will convert your drives filestructure to a graphical display, here you can just click on the large objects and see which file it is and thus quickly find those large files that is taking up space..

Sure there are other util’s like this, some may even be better I don’t know – but this one is simple, small, free and works..

http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/

a fairly good alternative is;
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/
this works much the same way just with a pie chart instead, and as I recall requires java installed.

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