ali aboos

It’s unbelievable that Windows Vista and 2008 Server are so dumb. As soon I connect a USB drive to my server and boot, it refuses to use my hard drive for a new OS install and gives me “Windows could not determine if this computer contains a valid system volume” error.

So, why did I have a USB drive connected? Because I wanted to setup a new Windows 2008 Standard Server for the office, but from home during my spare time. I HAD to have the drive connected in order to load my RAID drivers during install. I started playing around with different BIOS settings to see if I can get Winblows to install properly. Disabling USB controller was basically not an option. I looked at my boot sequence settings and my flash drive wasn’t even enabled, so I went ahead and enabled it, but moved it to down after my DVD drive and RAID controller. Tried again, no success. I was lucky that my high end RAID card had a boot partition feature… I created a boot partition, disabled USB and installed Windows.

Anyway… Rob commented with a simpler way which didn’t apply to my remote installation dilemma, but works for the rest (thank a lot, Rob). Remove the USB drive right after RAID drivers are loaded, wait a bit and then try to pick a partition for your OS. That works… the USB issue is something that keeps giving since I ran into another problem with Windows 7 RTM installation. You can check the “related articles” link at the bottom of the page.

AD Users and Computers, and a few other administrative snap-in’s are 32 bit components. To add those snap-in’s to your mmc you will have to run mmc with /32 switch.

In order to be able to save your console for future use and be able to access all 32 and 64 bit components, you need to save two copies. Run an instance using mmc.exe and the other mmc.exe /32, then save both with different names you can recognize.

This usually happens on laptops where resolution is high and font size is set to large or custom. Simply change your font size in display properties – Settings tab – Advanced and reduce font size until all page is visible. You may have to reboot and will need to have administrative privileges to change font size.

Search for Adobe Customization Wizard 9 (8 for Acrobat 8.0 family). Install and run the programs. You will be asked to navigate to location where you .msi file is… the rest is easy!

Adobe Customization Wizard can be used for the following Adobe software:

Adobe Acrobat 3D

Adobe Acrobat Professional

Adobe Acrobat Standard

Adobe Acrobat Elements

Adobe Reader