Saturday, January 15, 2011

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

How to delete a print job that keeps crashing the print spooler

Say you're printing something and all of a sudden you get this error:










Ohhh noooo! What do you do now? So you click off the message and reprint your print job and this time you wait and wait and wait, but nothing prints. So you check your printers and faxes and "What the heck!! Where did my printers go?". Everything has disappeared!

Fear not, that is because you Print Spooler service has crashed. Sometimes a print job can cause your spooler to take a dump. What is Print Spooler you might ask? Well a Print Spooler is an application that manages print requests or jobs so that one job can be processed while other jobs are placed in a queue.

So now you have no printers and you need to print. You can either start the print spooler service and then try refreshing your printers and see if your printers reappears and then quickly go into the print queue to delete the print job (your print job might just sit there saying 'deleting' for a long time) or your print spooler will crash again.

Follow these steps to quickly and easily delete the corrupted job from your print queue. 
1. Make sure your print spooler is stopped (which it might already be, but make sure anyway) by going to services (click on start > run > type service.msc). Right click on print spooler and click stop.

2. Navigate to C:\windows\system32\spool\printers directory and delete the .shd and .spl files only.  Don't delete subdirectories if any present.

3. Restart print spooler service and check to make sure you printers are present.

Do a test print and you should be good to go....

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

HP Storage MSL5026S2 Device Failure

So yesterday when i was done replacing backup tapes into our HP MSL5026 tape library, i started the normal "scratch" procedures to prep tapes for backup and all of a sudden i get this weird error message:








And on the front of the drive i have an error message that states "Fault code 3200 (hard). Shuttle jammed". now what do i do? This sucker is out of warranty and i need backups.

So i research this a bit and there were different procedures online for resolving this issue, but no matter what i tried, not hing worked. On top of everything i started getting another error message "The library is busy performing an operation initiated from an external source".

I also came across steps from HP that said do perform a recalibration on the tape drive which i could not due to the weird busy error above, HP steps:
















What I ended up doing was to manually release the lock mechanism that hold the doors in place and reseated all tapes. Apparently one of the tapes were sticking out and had caused the robotic arm to freeze. After reseating all tapes, i rebooted device along with server and all tapes were recognized and prepped successfully.

In case you get the above error message try these steps:
1) shut down device and manually open device doors  (by sticking a paper clip or something) and reseat all tapes

2) perform calibration by using the ltt utility found here  Install software (no reboot required), perform software calibration.

3) Perform a vertical calibration by pressing menu on the front of device, select factory and then type 56789. Select Validate. Next select clear SRM position offsets and then select OK. Select Back and then Back again. Reboot device.

 If the above steps do not work then you are out of luck because then it is a mechanical problem and for that HP will need to send out their "official authorized Field Engineer" to replace the robotic arm or track device.

hope these steps help you.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

CoreConfigurator 2.0 for Server 2008 R2 Core edition review (no sound)

CoreConfigurator 2.0 for Server 2008 R2 Core edition review (no sound)

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

CoreConfigurator for Server 2008 core edition

CoreConfigurator for Server 2008 core edition

Monday, March 29, 2010

Server 2008 Core Active Directory Setup

Server 2008 Core Active Directory Setup

Friday, March 19, 2010

How to install Active Directory first Domain Controller in a new forest - Part 1

How to install Active Directory first Domain Controller in a new forest - Part 1