How to Boot a VMware Virtual Machine from a USB Drive

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Do you have an OS installed on your USB thumb drive? Booting from it in a VM is now possible, you’ll just have to use a simple trick to get it to work.

Last week we showed you how to put Ubuntu on a USB drive in a separate partition, and we also discussed working with VMware Player (our favourite VM Client). But have you ever tried booting from a USB drive in VMWare? It doesn’t allow doing so, but we will force it to boot from a USB, with a bit of old geekery.

If you remember, we have showed you how to boot from a USB drive even if your old PC doesn’t allow booting from one. That’s right, using Plop Boot Manager. All we need to do is to load the Plop ISO in VMware, attach and enable the USB drive in VMware, and finally select the USB option in Plop Boot Manager to boot from the USB.

So, visit the Plop boot manager download site.

Click Download, download the latest version, save it in a location, and unzip it. The file named “plpbt.iso” is the one we need to use.

Open VMware, select “Create a new Virtual machine”

In the window that opens, select “Installer Disc image file”, browse to the Plop ISO and select it. VMware will ask you to specify an Operating System. Click next to continue

Select Linux as the Guest Operating System, and from the list of versions, select Ubuntu (or if you have a different OS, select it and its version). Click Next

Specify the name of the VM and the destination where it will be saved.

On the next screen, select “Store Virtual Disk as single file”, and allot 5 GB to it, since we will be booting from the USB drive, and not actually doing an install. Click Next

On the final screen, you’ll see the hardware resources automatically allocated for this particular VM.

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Make sure that USB is enabled, and if it isn’t, click “Customize Hardware”, click the USB Controller device, and check the first two options. Click OK to continue.

Make sure your USB drive with a bootable OS is attached. Start the VM, you’ll boot into Plop. First, right click the USB icon on the bottom right corner of VMware Player, and click Connect (Disconnect from Host). Wait a couple of seconds, then click inside the Window, and select the USB option using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

And now you’ll be booting into your OS from the USB. Not only you can boot into Ubuntu from a bootable USB, but you can boot into any bootable OS using this method (DSL, Puppy, or even Windows Installation ISO, whatever bootable OS you have on the USB). Not quite handy perhaps, but still geeky!

How to clear the Diskspace in server

Hope u can have more free space by doing the below things.. u can have some GBs of space free..
1) delete or move the file from

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Cached Installs
2) Delete contents from C:\recycler ( To see this, u need to uncheck the hide protected OS files from tools-folder options - view)
3) Delete c:\temp and c:\windows\temp
4) MOve friles C:\WINDOWS\$hf_mig$ to D:\ drive or any available drive or delete the old files.
5) Move C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB*****$ to D:\ drive
6) Delete files C:\WINDOWS\PCHealth\ERRORREP\UserDumps and delete old logs in C:\WINDOWS\PCHealth\ERRORREP\QSIGNOFF
7) Move C:\WINDOWS\Installer files from D:\ drive
8) MOve C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache to D:\drive
9) Compress the old log files if any 

I have not tried  for Windows 7... but it will works for it I Guess...

Forcing a System Crash from the Keyboard

Most of the following keyboards can cause a system crash directly:

PS/2 keyboards connected on i8042prt ports

This feature is available in Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows operating system.

USB keyboards

This feature is available in:

• Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 if the hotfix available with KB 244139 is installed.
  
• Windows Server 2003 (with Service Pack 2 or later).
  
• Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1 if the hotfix available with KB 971284 is installed.
• Windows Server 2008 (with Service Pack 2 or later).
• Windows 7 and later versions of Windows operating system.

You must ensure the following three settings before the keyboard can cause a system crash:

1. If you wish a crash dump file to be written, you must enable such dump files, choose the path and file name, and select the size of the dump file. For more information, see Enabling a Kernel-Mode Dump File.
   
2. With PS/2 keyboards, you must enable the keyboard-initiated crash in the registry. In the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters, create a value named CrashOnCtrlScroll, and set it equal to a REG_DWORD value of 0x01.
   
3. With USB keyboards, you must enable the keyboard-initiated crash in the registry. In the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters, create a value named CrashOnCtrlScroll, and set it equal to a REG_DWORD value of 0x01.
   

You must restart the system for these settings to take effect.
After this is completed, the keyboard crash can be initiated by using the following hotkey sequence: Hold down the rightmost CTRL key, and press the SCROLL LOCK key twice.
The system then calls KeBugCheck and issues bug check 0xE2 (MANUALLY_INITIATED_CRASH). Unless crash dumps have been disabled, a crash dump file is written at this point.
If a kernel debugger is attached to the crashed machine, the machine will break into the kernel debugger after the crash dump file has been written.
For more information on using this feature, refer to the article Generate a memory dump file by using the keyboard (KB 244139).

Defining Alternate Keyboard Shortcuts to Force a System Crash from the Keyboard

You can configure values under the following registry subkeys for different keyboard shortcut sequences to generate the memory dump file:

• For PS/2 keyboards:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\crashdump
  
• For USB keyboards:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\crashdump
  

You must create the following registry REG_DWORD values under these subkeys:

Dump1Keys

The Dump1Keys registry value is a bit map of the first hot key to use. For example, instead of using the rightmost CTRL key to initiate the hot key sequence, you can set the first hot key to be the leftmost SHIFT key. The values for the first hot key are described in the following table.

Value	First key used in the keyboard shortcut sequence
0x01	Rightmost SHIFT key
0x02	Rightmost CTRL key
0x04	Rightmost ALT key
0x10	Leftmost SHIFT key
0x20	Leftmost CTRL key
0x40	Leftmost ALT key

Note  You can assign Dump1Keys a value that enables one or more keys as the first key used in the keyboard shortcut sequence. For example, assign Dump1Keys a value of 0x11 to define both the rightmost and leftmost SHIFT keys as the first key in the keyboard shortcut sequence.

Dump2Key

The Dump2Key registry value is the index into the scancode table for the keyboard layout of the target computer. The following is the actual table in the driver.

const UCHAR keyToScanTbl[134] = { 
        0x00,0x29,0x02,0x03,0x04,0x05,0x06,0x07,0x08,0x09,
        0x0A,0x0B,0x0C,0x0D,0x7D,0x0E,0x0F,0x10,0x11,0x12,
        0x13,0x14,0x15,0x16,0x17,0x18,0x19,0x1A,0x1B,0x00,
        0x3A,0x1E,0x1F,0x20,0x21,0x22,0x23,0x24,0x25,0x26,
        0x27,0x28,0x2B,0x1C,0x2A,0x00,0x2C,0x2D,0x2E,0x2F,
        0x30,0x31,0x32,0x33,0x34,0x35,0x73,0x36,0x1D,0x00,
        0x38,0x39,0xB8,0x00,0x9D,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,
        0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xD2,0xD3,0x00,0x00,0xCB,
        0xC7,0xCF,0x00,0xC8,0xD0,0xC9,0xD1,0x00,0x00,0xCD,
        0x45,0x47,0x4B,0x4F,0x00,0xB5,0x48,0x4C,0x50,0x52,
        0x37,0x49,0x4D,0x51,0x53,0x4A,0x4E,0x00,0x9C,0x00,
        0x01,0x00,0x3B,0x3C,0x3D,0x3E,0x3F,0x40,0x41,0x42,
        0x43,0x44,0x57,0x58,0x00,0x46,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,
        0x00,0x7B,0x79,0x70 };

Note   Index 124 (sysreq) is a special case because an 84-key keyboard has a different scan code.

If you define alternate keyboard shortcuts to force a system crash from a USB or PS/2 keyboard, you must either set the CrashOnCtrlScroll registry value to 0 or remove it from the registry.

Limitations

It is possible for a system to freeze in such a way that the keyboard shortcut sequence will not work. However, this should be a very rare occurrence. Using the keyboard shortcut sequence to initiate a crash will work even in many instances where CTRL+ALT+DELETE does not work.
Forcing a system crash from the keyboard does not work if the computer stops responding at a high interrupt request level (IRQL). This limitation exists because the Kbdhid.sys driver, which allows the memory dump process to run, operates at a lower IRQL than the i8042prt.sys driver.

How ro check the remote server uptime

How to check the remote server uptime

 1) For local server

Use the command c:\uptime

2) For remote server

use the command c:\uptime \\server name



3) For multiple servers

Create a folder by name uptime in c:\uptime

Copy the below content and paste it in a notepad and save it as .vbs (ex: uptime.vbs) in c:\uptime

create 2 blank text files by name input.txt and output.txt

copy the uptime.exe file to C:\uptime folder

now you have 4 files in c:\uptime folder

C:\uptime\input.txt,

C:\uptime\output.txt

C:\uptime\uptime.exe

C:\uptime\uptime.vbs

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Set fs = CreateObject ("scripting.filesystemobject")
Set ts = CreateObject ("WScript.shell")
Set ms = fs.OpenTextFile ("C:\Uptime\input.txt", 1, True)
Set js = fs.OpenTextFile ("D:\Uptime\output.txt", 2, True)

Do While ms.AtEndOfLine True
strcom = ms.ReadLine
set us = ts.Exec ("c:\Uptime\uptime "& strcom)
rs = us.StdOut.ReadAll

js.WriteLine rs

js.WriteBlankLines (1)

Loop
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



when you need to check the multiple servers uptime, just add the servers list in notepad and run uptime.vbs from command line( or right click on uptime.vbs and click open with command prompt.

Check the output.txt file to see the multiple servers uptime