All posts filed under: Sysinternals

Sysinternals: Auto update script for sysinternals tools

Published by Ravikanth

I have written it many times but I like to say it again and again. I am a Sysinternals fan. I use their tools quite often, if not everyday. Sysinternals team releases updates to these tools often. These updates are either bug fixes or somtimes new features / tools. There are multiple ways to know about these updates Subscribe to sysinternals blog RSS feed and download the update manually Visit sysinternals website regurarly and get the updates when ever available Or many other ways…. I am not used to any RSS aggregators or readers. Even if I use one, I still have to manually download the update. It is the same case with visting their website. I wanted to write something to automatically update my sysinternals tools folder as and when there is an update. Again, there are multiple ways to achieve that. I could have written a RSS listener service which will look for updates in the Sysinternals feed and download the updates once they are available.  But that is too complex for a simple task like downloading files from a website. My method to achieve …

Poor man’s P2V just got better; disk2VHD 1.1 is available

Published by Ravikanth

A week back I wrote about a new sysinternals tool called Disk2VHD. After the initial 1.0 release, many people have expressed the need for having command line support. Sysinternals team listened to all of this. They just released disk2vhd 1.1. You can now use the following options to perform p2v from command-line. Usage: disk2vhd <[drive: [drive:]…]|[*]> <vhdfile> Example: disk2vhd * c:\vhd\snapshot.vhd Where can you use this option? I can think of many possibilities. You can now use a simple script to walk through all of your systems in the data center and capture all physical hard drives as VHD files. Imagine being able to run this immediately after sysprep to capture the sysprep’ed system volume as VHD file. You can use that as a master image for both physical and virtual machines I will write about the second option sometime soon..Stay tuned.

Sysinternals’ new tool disk2vhd a.k.a poor man’s P2V

Published by Ravikanth

I am a big fan of sysinternals tools and I use these tools quite often to debug OS related issues. These tools are quite useful when you want to understand internals of OS. Mark and his team has been doing a great job in keeping these tools up to date and adding new features once in a while. One such new tool that got released yesterday is Disk2VHD. You can download it here. Here is how TechNet link decribes this new tool. Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance …

The case of Internet Explorer crash

Published by Ravikanth

This is yet another post in the “case of ..” series of articles. This is about an IE7 crash I was facing when I tried to open a time sheet application. Every time I open IE and log in to the time sheet application, IE will close with no error message. Now, this can be hard to even troubleshoot when there is no error message. But not on Windows — We have the help of Sysinternals tools. So, I opened Sysinternal’s ProcMon and filtered out for events from iexplorer.exe. At this point, I just tried to reproduce the issue of IE crash. After I had the repro, I saved the ProcMon capture and started looking at the events. There was nothing really suspicious in the capture mostly because there was nothing wrong with iexplorer.exe. Now, I wanted to find out if there is any thing interesting just before the iexplorer.exe process exit. For this pupose, I created another filter on the operation “Process Exit”.  Now this will filter out all events except the process exit event. …

The case of delayed run dialog initialization

Published by Ravikanth

Yes, I got inspired by Mark’s “the case of” series and hence the title of this post. I use a Windows Vista laptop at work and was facing an issue when I try to open Run dialog either by clicking on Start-> Run and pressing Windows + R key combination. It used to take more than 10 seconds to open up. I always wanted to see what was going wrong but never really cared to do that until it became really frustrating yesterday. So, I decided to use Sysinternal’s ProcMon to start my investigation. But before that I need to know what process to monitor. This is essential because process monitor gives lot of information all of which may not be really relevant to the issue I was facing. My commonsense and little bit of OS internals knowledge told me that it should be explorer.exe. To verify that it was correct, I opened Run dialog and then open Task Manager. Now, when I right-click on Run in task manager and select Go to Process, it …