Troubleshooting

When something is broken: symptoms, the commands that show the cause, and the fix, with real output.

esxcli storage core path list: reading and fixing ESXi storage paths

When a datastore goes read only at 02:00, or a LUN that used to have four paths suddenly has three, the answer…

reg.exe is the registry's command line front end, and Microsoft's own registry article for advanced users calls it the Console Registry Tool…

runas starts a program under a different account than the one you are signed in with. It is the built-in answer to…

How to create a persistent VSS shadow copy with diskshadow, expose it as a drive letter, script it in a .dsh file, and delete it without collateral.

whoami does not ask Windows who you are. It prints what is already inside the access token that Windows built for your…

wbadmin is the command line front end to Windows Server Backup. It creates one off and scheduled backups, restores volumes, files, applications…

Almost every backup on Windows is taken from a shadow copy rather than from the live volume. The Volume Shadow Copy Service…

Most of what administrators know about chkdsk was true in 2005. Run it with /f /r, reboot, watch a progress percentage for…

The server is slow. Users are complaining. You open Task Manager and see CPU sitting at 90% - but Task Manager only…

Every time you run sfc /scannow or DISM /RestoreHealth, Windows writes a detailed record of what it found and what it did…