Although I still do not know the source of this error (essentially my exchange store stopped being able to mount) the fix was rather obvious. Searching the web did not help though. Microsoft said it was a problem in Exchange 2003 SP1 and Googling showed me many people who gave up and restored their last backup (which of course would be the best solution).

ESEUTIL by itself kept throwing the same JET_errFileIOBeyondEOF error except for eseutil /k "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv.1.edb" This showed that my .edb data was fine but it stopped at the .stm file.

Microsoft(R) Exchange Server Database Utilities
Version 6.5
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Initiating CHECKSUM mode...
Database: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb
Streaming File: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.STM
Temp. Database: TEMPCHKSUM5352.EDB


File: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb

Checksum Status (% complete)

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................


29186 pages seen
0 bad checksums
0 correctable checksums
316 uninitialized pages
0 wrong page numbers
0x42c067 highest dbtime (pgno 0xd4)

1825 reads performed
114 MB read
2 seconds taken
57 MB/second
1809651 milliseconds used
991 milliseconds per read
1516 milliseconds for the slowest read
63 milliseconds for the fastest read

File: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.STM


So I simply deleted my .stm file and rebuilt it with C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin>eseutil /p /createstm "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb". Voila, it worked and I could mount my Exchange Store! CAUTION: there may be user information in this file. If your users are all Outlook clients it is probably not much used but if your users are IMAP/POP3 users then they may have a lot of information there which will be lost. Q555146. Always make a backup of any file that you are recreating.

Microsoft(R) Exchange Server Database Utilities
Version 6.5
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Initiating REPAIR mode...
Database: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb
Streaming File: C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.STM
Temp. Database: TEMPREPAIR4596.EDB

Checking database integrity.

Scanning Status (% complete)

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................


Scanning the database.

Scanning Status (% complete)

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
...................................................


Repairing damaged tables.

Scanning Status (% complete)

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
.........................
Deleting unicode fixup table.
..........................


Repair completed. Database corruption has been repaired!

Note:
It is recommended that you immediately perform a full backup
of this database. If you restore a backup made before the
repair, the database will be rolled back to the state
it was in at the time of that backup.

Operation completed successfully with 595 (JET_wrnDatabaseRepaired, Database cor
ruption has been repaired) after 116.391 seconds.

Below are some additional links to Microsoft support write-ups.
Q313184
Q555146

The software raid solutions of Windows 2003 is designed to only allow access to your mirrored data. For example you can install the mirrored disk into another working system to access the folders. It is not designed to be a bootable recovery solution in case the primary disk fails. Simply taking the good working drive and trying to boot from it will fail. You should be able to boot from a boot disk but not boot the mirrored drive itself.

The first most likely problem is that the mirrored drive does not have a MBR. This can be fixed using your Windows Server CD and booting to the recovery console. There you can use the FIXMBR command to write a Master Boot Record to your mirrored drive. Using the Recovery Console will also verify if the mirrored drive has a working system as it will show up as a Windows installation and you will be asked for your Windows Admin password to get access to the console.

You also might not have a proper boot.ini file. You can check this using the recovery console's bootcfg command. For me it worked but I would not rely on this in an emergency. I had simply wanted to move my Windows 2003 installation to a bigger disk so I always had a good backup to fall back on. Normally I would use Acronis workstation to clone my drive but for some reason it would just restart (when booting from the CDROM) everytime I tried to clone my Windows Server's dynamic disk partition.

NOTE: If you are tying to simply duplicate your drive, be sure to not break the mirror with both drives connected. If you do so then one of the drives will receive a new drive letter and probably not be able to boot with it. You should always break the mirror with one of the drives already removed.

Tags: windows, mirror

Although Apple's Airport Extreme can share a printer it was not quite so easy to use from my Vista Business computer. The instructions from Apple had me able to print only half a page to my USB HP Deskjet. Then the print job would error out. To make matters worse I could not delete the print job either.

So, here's what worked for me and hopefully for anyone else with this problem.

1. In your Printer Properties > Ports tab, disable "Enable bidirectional support". This allowed me to delete the print jobs.
2. In your Printer Properties > Advanced tab, disable "Enable advanced printing features". This allowed me to print whole pages.
   

I don't know if it will work for every printer but I can now print from my Vista computer.

Tags: printing, Airport

Well, maybe you know this already but at least the older versions of Outlook like 2000 use the web browser Internet Explorer (IE) to render the HTML emails. So what? Well, Outlook also takes the page margins as defined in IE and uses thoses when you try to print an HTML based email the header uses the Outlook margin settings and the email message uses the Internet Explorer margin settings.

If you have your IE margins set tozero then when you print your emails your printer will probably cut off the left side of your message (even if your print preview looks okay). In that case you need to be sure that your Outlook and IE margins are configured the same.

Tags: Outlook, Html mail

Since upgrading from XP Pro to Vista I have lost count of the times that what I am working on freezes and a dialog appears saying that Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer or some other software has "stopped working". The next step is to close every instance of that software and restart what I was doing.

On top of that, coming back from hibernation is messy, at least with Microsoft Outlook 2007. The software simply jams. I cannot even use the task manager to kill any instances but have to restart the whole computer to get access to my email.

What makes all of these problems even more evident is that whenever the new User Account Control appears, the entire screen blacks out like it is going to reboot making me nervous and start looking for the blue screen infos. I would have thought that with all of the new graphical look, a message that can appear rather frequently could look a bit less stressful.

So overall, I have not been impressed with the new stability of the Vista system though some of the new features are nice sticking with XP Pro seems to be the surest way to go for me.

Tags: Vista, Stable

I have a HP laserjet 1100 being shared on my Windows XP SP2 machine and I wanted to use it from MacOSX 10.4.9 without doing anything fancy. This apparently is a little harder than it would seem. I finally found two solutions of which I preferred the first (HPIJS).

• Install Foomatic/HPIJS
• Install Gutenprint
  

Once you have installed one of the two print engines above, you can use the standard Add Printer dialog of MacOSX 10.4.x and browse for the Windows XP machine in the correct workgroup, select the shared printer and choose the correct driver for it (the HP 1100 driver was installed with one of the above two print engines.)

Personally, I found the Gutenprint drivers to have a little too much contrast and boxiness in them. These problems did not happen with the HPIJS drivers.  Gutenprint had many more customization options so maybe enough test prints could give me a better result.

In the standard print dialog, you might also need to manually set the Printer Features option to enable high resolution printing (and then save it as a preset to avoid setting it again.)

Tags: printing, Shared printer, XP

If all of a sudden your network folders/ WebDAV accounts have stopped working after an SP2 upgrade to your Windows software it is actually a new "feature" from Microsoft. In SP2, all webdav accounts now require https secured connections by default (previously http only was the default). Unfortunately you do not receive an error message, the only symptom is that your login fails over and over.

WebDAV extends the HTTP protocol to allow users to publish, lock, and manage files on the Web site like a remote hard disk. This makes filesharing very easy as you are using HTTP traffic. In many ways it is considered the evolution of FTP.

Fortunately there are a few solutions.

1. 
   
2. add ":80" to the end of the domain name like "http://mysite.com:80" (assuming the webdavservice is on port 80). This tells webdav to use the old http login instead of requiring https.
3. 
   
4. make a registry change to enable the old Authentication as described here (KB841215)
5. 
   
6. install SSL security on the WebDAV site (which is really not a bad idea.)
7. 
   

Another Microsoft problem is from a recent service pack update from Microsoft that limits the number of attributes per XML element to 32. More information on that fix can be found here (KB888164).

To make matters worse, there seem to be about 30 different versions of the WebDAV libraries floating about, changing based on the Windows software that you use. This site has a good list of the different versions and problems related to each of them.

Anyways, at least the WebDAV client still works but it is not quite as easy to use as could be expected.

Tags: webdav, Sharing, XP

You can configure Windows XP to automate the logon process if your computer is not part of a domain. This is great if you want the computer to always boot to a defult account but still leave the other accounts active.

1. 
   
2. Click Start, click Run, and type control userpasswords2.
3. 
   
4. Clear the Users must enter a username and password to use this computer check box.
5. 
   
6. Click Apply.
7. 
   
8. Enter the user name and password you wish to automatically log on with, and then click OK.
9. 
   
10. Click OK again and you're all done.
11. 
    

This feature allows other users to start your computer and use the account that you establish to automatically log on. Enabling auto logon makes your computer more convenient to use, but can pose a security risk.

This tip and more is taken right from the Microsoft website at www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/tips/default.mspx

Tags: login, XP

So, my father-in-law wanted to print the photos that we emailed him on his inkjet photo printer. I was stuck trying to explain to my father-in-law how to change the printer configuration so that he could print to 4x6 inch paper instead of a full page. It was just becoming complex using the Windows Photo Printing Wizard.
Finally it came to me that I could simply create a second printer configuration in Windows that by default would use the 4x6 paper size. Then I simply named it something like HP photo SMALL".

That worked great since he could pick the "SMALL" printer for the little photos and the other one was renamed "BIG" for anything else. Hope the simple solution helps someone else.

Tags: printing, Shortcut

Creating a MS Word index with a word frequency list.

Tags: wordpress, index

Free tools for defragmenting, autologin, directory size, page file defragmentation and more.

Tags: tools, Optimize

I had loaded this up once to check it out, only to find I couldn't get rid of it. It would always try connecting to the Internet, always take up memory and just sit there in my toolbar like a bad joke you just couldn't forget. Argh, well, fortunately these folks http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=288 had the simple steps needed to get rid of it. Very simple, very quick.

And if you're looking to get rid of that, maybe cidaemon.exe and cisvc.exe aren't needed either. They are the automatic indexing on your NTFS drives. Just right click on each of your NTFS drives, choose Properties, and in the General tab uncheck "Allow Indexing Service... .