Dell Windows Recovery Images via the web

There are apparently a lot of people that don’t know about this, (or maybe google)?, so here’s a little publicity for Dell.

You can download the Windows recovery image for your Dell computer here:

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/OSISO

All you need is your service tag…and having purchased your Dell with Windows.

Here’s the full text of the site:

Recovery Image of Microsoft Windows

Download the recovery image

Download a recovery image of Microsoft Windows Operating System customized for your Dell product. Dell customization of the Windows image includes:

• Updated patches that address common issues for Dell systems.
• Dell support information.

The image provided in this download was configured to be bootable from either a DVD or USB.
Note: The recovery image contains the version of Windows that came installed on your computer. If you have upgraded your operating system, you will need to reinstall the upgrade after you have restored your system to the factory settings.

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Identify your Dell PC

To ensure that we provided the correct image available for your Dell PC, provide the Service Tag of the system to which the image will be installed.

Dell’s Hosted Recovery Image is designed to work with Dell systems. It is not designed to be supported on non-Dell PCs.

VirtualBox 5.0.16 Maintenance Release

A little late, released March 4, a maintenance release. Download.

Change log:

The following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed a problem which could lead to a wrong guest behavior on AMD CPUs (tickets #14831 and #15186)
• GUI: don’t try to synchronize the HID LEDs if the VM window is not active or if it’s minimized (Windows / Mac OS X hosts only; bug #14302)
• GUI: prevent a crash during startup under rare conditions
• GUI: sub-menu option to disable the guest-OS type overlay in the application dock icon on Mac OS X
• GUI: position off-screen windows to be fully visible again on relaunch
• GUI: hide the VT-x/AMD-V checkbox if raw-mode is not supported (usually Mac OS X hosts; bug #15178)
• PC speaker passthrough: new experimental feature, available on Linux host only
• Audio: several fixes for Mac OS X hosts + guests
• Audio: properly handle default audio device changes (Windows hosts)
• USB: serveral fixes for the xHCI controller (e.g. for webcam passthrough)
• BIOS: fixed int15/AH=83/AL=00 function (4.2.0 regression)
• iPXE: enable the HTTP download protocol on non-Linux hosts (bug #13628)
• Shared folders: fixed a failure to load the saved state under certain circumstances (bug #6314)
• Guest Control: added support for (cached) Active Directory authentication in case the domain controller is not reachable (anymore)
• Serial ports: raised the number of serial ports per VM from 2 to 4 (bug #9109)
• Serial ports: fix for the TCP/IP backend (Windows hosts only; bug #15188)
• SDK: make the Python webservice API binding work again (5.0 regression)
• Seamless mode: fixed a crash under certain circumstances (bug #15106)
• Linux hosts: fixed the /sbin/rcvboxdrv script as well as the missing shebang in two scripts (bugs #15055 and #15057)
• Linux hosts: properly uninstall Python files installed by the .run installer
• Windows hosts: hardening fix required for recent Windows insider builds (bug #14052)
• Windows hosts: fixed Python installation path (bug #13131)
• Windows hosts: support MTU larger than 2 KB with bridged networking (bug #15140)
• Windows hosts / guests: properly sign binaries using a sha-256 certificate (bug #15054)
• Windows Additions: fixed guest property enumeration of logged-in users
• Windows Additions: fixed sporadical failure of the graphics driver in Windows 10 guests (bug #14409)
• Windows Additions: under rare circumstances no mouse movement events were delivered to the guest

Adding NAT to Hyper-V in Windows 10 and higher

–This is no longer necessary, as Microsoft includes a default switch with NAT in the newer versions of Windows 10

And, it seems that NAT is no longer an accepted switch type

———-Deprecated———-

I found about this new way to create a NAT virtual switch in Hyper-V, it’s a lot less work than my previously documented method here: https://smudj.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/windows-10-hyper-v-setting-up-networking-shared-and-bridged-options/

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848455.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

New-VMSwitch

Creates a new virtual switch on one or more virtual machine hosts.

Syntax

Copy

Parameter Set: NetAdapterName
New-VMSwitch [-Name] <String> -NetAdapterName <String[]> [-AllowManagementOS <Boolean> ] [-CimSession <Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimSession[]> ] [-ComputerName <String[]> ] [-Credential <System.Management.Automation.PSCredential[]> ] [-EnableEmbeddedTeaming <Nullable [System.Boolean]> ] [-EnableIov <Boolean]> ] [-EnablePacketDirect <Nullable [System.Boolean]> ] [-MinimumBandwidthMode <VMSwitchBandwidthMode> {Default | Weight | Absolute | None} ] [-NATSubnetAddress <System.String> ] [-Notes <String> ] [-Confirm] [-WhatIf] [ <CommonParameters>]

Parameter Set: NetAdapterInterfaceDescription
New-VMSwitch [-Name] <String> -NetAdapterInterfaceDescription <String[]> [-AllowManagementOS <Boolean> ] [-CimSession <Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimSession[]> ] [-ComputerName <String[]> ] [-Credential <System.Management.Automation.PSCredential[]> ] [-EnableEmbeddedTeaming <Nullable [System.Boolean]> ] [-EnableIov <Boolean]> ] [-EnablePacketDirect <Nullable [System.Boolean]> ] [-MinimumBandwidthMode <VMSwitchBandwidthMode> {Default | Weight | Absolute | None} ] [-NATSubnetAddress <System.String> ] [-Notes <String> ] [-Confirm] [-WhatIf] [ <CommonParameters>]

Parameter Set: SwitchType
New-VMSwitch [-Name] <String> -SwitchType <VMSwitchType> {Private | Internal | External} [-CimSession <Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimSession[]> ] [-ComputerName <String[]> ] [-Credential <System.Management.Automation.PSCredential[]> ] [-EnableEmbeddedTeaming <Nullable [System.Boolean]> ] [-EnableIov <Boolean]> ] [-EnablePacketDirect <Nullable [System.Boolean]> ] [-MinimumBandwidthMode <VMSwitchBandwidthMode> {Default | Weight | Absolute | None} ] [-NATSubnetAddress <System.String> ] [-Notes <String> ] [-Confirm] [-WhatIf] [ <CommonParameters>]

Example

New-VMSwitch -SwitchName "Virtual Switch" -SwitchType NAT -NATSubnetAddress "172.16.0.0/12"

Running DNS, DHCP, ADUC, etc, MMC Admin consoles with Windows 10 Microsoft Account

Note: This assumes you’ve already got the RSAT tools installed.  RSAT for Windows 10

Building on my post here for Hyper-V manager:

Running Hyper-V Manager as a different user in Windows 10 (Runas)

You can use the same method to get Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) and DNS MMC admin consoles working if you’re logged in with your Microsoft account versus your domain account:

DNS shortcut:

C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /savecred /user:domain\username  "cmd /c Start /B %SystemRoot%\system32\mmc.exe %SystemRoot%\system32\dnsmgmt.msc""

Icon path:

%SystemRoot%\system32\dnsmgr.dll

ADUC shortcut:

C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /savecred /user:domain\username  "cmd /c Start /B %SystemRoot%\system32\dsa.msc""

Icon path:

%SystemRoot%\system32\dsadmin.dll

When you double-click, you’ll get prompted for the password (if you haven’t already) and also for UAC

DHCP is a little more involved as the RSAT doesn’t include the DHCP manager.  NOTE: this is not currently supported by MS

1. 1. copy dhcpmgmt.msc and dhcpsnap.dll.mui from %windir%\system32\system32\en-us on the 2012 server to the same location on the w10 pc
2. copy dhcpsnap.dll from %windir%\system32\ on the 2012 server to the w10 pc
3. From an admin cmd prompt run: regsvr32.exe dhcpsnap.dll
4. Create the short-cut: C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /savecred /user:domain\username  “cmd /c Start /B %SystemRoot%\system32\mmc.exe %SystemRoot%\system32\dhcpmgmt.msc””
5. Change Icon path: %SystemRoot%\System32\dhcpsnap.dll

You’ll need to manually add your DHCP server each time you run this.  I haven’t found a way to save the config.

*This was done with Windows 10 Build 1511 and Windows Server 2012.

For additional snap-ins, just modify the last part of the short-cut with the correct mmc path for the add-in you want.

3Ware 9650SE with ESXi 5.5

This is definitely an edge case, but if you’ve got a bunch of old 3Ware 9650SE RAID cards laying around, they will work in ESXi 5.5.  You’ll need to either create a custom ISO or add them via SSH after the install.  Adding them post-install is easier for me than making another custom ISO.

I’ve set up 2 ESXi servers (old x58 chipset MBs I had laying around) to do some clustering.  I picked up 5 9650SE RAID cards off of eBay for $55, including cables, and cobbled together some RAID volumes from the stacks of HDDs I had laying around.

I set up my ESXi boxes with a custom ISO I’d created previously that has the Realtec NIC, Intel NIC, and Intel SATA drivers (that’s another post, or look up ESXi-customizer). I was able to get the cards up and working with minimal issues (after I updated the firmware to the most current version…was a puzzle as a couple cards were updated and just worked, then I got stuck with some others and they wouldn’t work at all until the FW was updated)

I then replaced one of the ESXi boxes with an x79 system and could not get the RAID card to work with the existing drivers I had.  Hours and multiple reboots, driver uploads, I found another driver that works from Avago (direct): http://docs.avagotech.com/docs/12349232

You can find it here: http://www.avagotech.com/ –> Support –> Support Documents and Downloads –> Legacy RAID controllers –> 3ware 9650SE-xxxx –> Search –> Driver –> VMware ESXi 5.0 Update 1 for 9650SE/9690SA

Connect to your ESXi server via SSH (you’ll need to enable this first) and use the command:

localcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/datastore-name/scsi-3w-9xxx-2.27.08.036-1OEM.500.0.0.472560.x86_64.vib