Mount ISO in Windows Server

 I ran into an interesting issue today.  Windows Server 2012 R2 had no options to mount an ISO file.  I tried a couple of 3rd party programs to do it but they would not work either.  I found a command that can be used with PowerShell to mount an ISO and it worked perfectly.  Here's the text of the command.

Good luck!

Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath 'D:\Path\To\Image.iso' -StorageType ISO -PassThru | Get-Volume

How to Enable or Disable the News and Interests Taskbar Windows 10

The latest updates to Windows 10 has now enabled the News and Interests taskbar by the clock on Windows 10.  Right away this started generating questions from staff on what it is or why it was turned on.   Again Microsoft pushes something out that you may not want running.

Since the GPO ADMX for it doesn't seem to be working on Windows 10 Professional, here is a quick command you can run that will make an immediate registry change and turn it off.

reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Feeds" /v ShellFeedsTaskbarViewMode /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f

This fully hides it.  If however you want it back on change the DWORD value.  Enter 0 (show icon and text) or 1 (show icon only).

Disk Management and Explorer Show Different Drive Size

 I ran into this issue today when trying to extend out the drive size on a data drive on our primary file server.  After expanding the virtual disk in VMware, I brought up computer management (compmgmt.exe if you want to go command line quicker).

I expanded out the disk and immediately noticed that explorer didn't reflect that change after a refresh.  Also, disk management could no longer access the disk to make any edits.  I restarted the virtual disk service with no success.  A restart also proved futile.

MAKE A BACKUP BEFORE RUNNING THESE COMMANDS!

After some quick research, here is the fix.  Use DISKPART from an elevated command prompt.  Just follow the commands below and choose the proper disk on your VM.  After running the command, a quick refresh of explorer now shows the correct size.

Good luck!

vCenter 6.7 Resizing Disk Fails Invalid Operation for Device 0

 This one has been around for some time but now due to the data drive on my Exchange server getting closer and closer to full, I had to find a fix and here it is.  So simple and yet so hard to find on the web.

Checking the D: drive on the Exchange server showed the disk had a size of 150.254450347GB.  This disk had been restored from Datto at some point in the past and since that date this was the size showing.

Whenever attempting to expand the drive vCenter thew this error:  Invalid operation for device '0'.

I tried different sizes from adding just a few gigs to going all the way up to 200GB but getting the same error.

Ready for the fix?  You won't believe how easy it was.

1. Log into vCenter using the flex (Flash) client instead of the HTML 5 client.

2. Resize your disk successfully.

THAT'S IT!!  Can you believe it?  After all of these articles I read about changing the parameters on the VMX file, cloning the server, etc. etc. it turned out to be the behavior of the HTML 5 client.  Let's hope VMware fixes this in the next versions of vCenter before they fully remove the Flash functionality.

Good luck!

Fix Cisco ASDM Windows 10 Error "This app can't run on your PC"

 Seems that Microsoft has done some switching of how the Windows Scripting Host path is found.

This is a simple fix.

1. Install ASDM as you normally would

2. Right click on the shortcut.

3. In the "Target" line you will see a very long path to wscript.exe.  Simply change this path to C:\Windows\System32\wscript.exe (leave the invisible.vbs run.bat on the end as these scripts are used to open ASDM).

4. Apply the change.

After doing this I was able to open ASDM normally and use it to update ASDM and AnyConnect files on my ASA.

Good luck!