Kapothi Tech Blog

Volumes larger than 2088958 megabytes cannot be protected

February 2nd, 2012

Kapuwa

Windows Server Backup – Can’t handle greater than 2TB Volumes

I have just discovered that Windows Server Backup on Windows server 2008 R2 is incapable of backing up any volume 2TB or over. This, it turns out, is due to a VHD file limit. Backup essentially creates a VHD for each volume in the backup, which is great for recovery, but causes this annoying problem.

The not very helpful message you will receive if you try a full server backup when one of the volumes is too large is

“Volumes larger than 2088958 megabytes cannot be protected.”The work-around is to not do full volume backups, but make your selection of folders. Choose ‘Custom’ backup configuration and then just select all the folders on the volume that is too large.

The work-around is to not do full volume backups, but make your selection of folders. Choose ‘Custom’ backup configuration and then just select all the folders on the volume that is too large.

Killing a Windows Service that seems to hang on “Stopping”

November 28th, 2011

neyomax

It sometimes happens (and it’s not a good sign most of the time): you’d like to stop a Windows Service, and when you issue the stop command through the SCM (Service Control Manager) or by using the ServiceProcess classes in the .NET Framework or by other means (net stop, Win32 API), the service remains in the state of “stopping” and never reaches the stopped phase. It’s pretty simple to simulate this behavior by creating a Windows Service in C# (or any .NET language whatsoever) and adding an infinite loop in the Stop method. The only way to stop the service is by killing the process then. However, sometimes it’s not clear what the process name or ID is (e.g. when you’re running a service hosting application that can cope with multiple instances such as SQL Server Notification Services). The way to do it is as follows:

•Go to the command-prompt and query the service (e.g. the SMTP service) by using sc:
sc queryex SMTPSvc
•This will give you the following information:
SERVICE_NAME: SMTPSvc
TYPE : 20 WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS
STATE : 4 RUNNING
(STOPPABLE, PAUSABLE, ACCEPTS_SHUTDOWN)
WIN32_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0×0)
SERVICE_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0×0)
CHECKPOINT : 0×0
WAIT_HINT : 0×0
PID : 388
FLAGS :
•or something like this (the “state” will mention stopping).
•Over here you can find the process identifier (PID), so it’s pretty easy to kill the associated process either by using the task manager or by using taskkill:
taskkill /PID 388 /F

Please be careful when you do this; it’s useful for emergencies but you shouldn’t use it on a regular basis (use it as a last chance to solve the problem or to avoid the need of a reboot in an exceptional situation). It can even be used to stop a service that has the “NOT-STOPPABLE” and/or “IGNORES_SHUTDOWN” flag set (e.g. Terminal Services on a Windows Server 2003 is non-stoppable), at least when it’s not hosted in the system process. You can query all this information by means of the sc command.

where the /F flag is needed to force the process kill (first try without the flag).