Inplace upgrades gone horribly wrong

[Xon]

So I just did an inplace upgrade of my Windows 2008 fileserver to Windows 2008 r2 (aka Vista Server -> Win7 Server). Man, I've managed to encounter several problems I ahve no fucking idea what went wrong.

1) Turn on or Off Windows features just doesn't do anything. CLick on the link and nothing happens!
2) Some new Windows updates cause the installer to crash and Windows Updates to hang.
3) the Roles/Feature list in the Server Management GUI tool just report "error" and don't display anything.
4) The share and storage management tool just uninstalled itself.
5) Manuel shutdown via Hyper-V GUI of a Win2k3 guest causes a permisions error. But it shutsdown fine. Doens't do it for my Win2k8r2 guest.

[Dalton]

You'll have better luck in G&C.

[Xon]

The really WTF is the roles/feature list was working before I uninstalled the DNS server (for some reason I had one on there for a while despite nothing pointing to it)

[phongn]

I hope you have backups! I don't have any really suggestions otherwise - it sounds like that installation is hosed

[Xon]

I ended up doing a repair install, which nuked the Hyper-V configuration details requiring me to recreate the VMs.

The major roles on the box are;

• Hyper-V
• File serving
• WSUS (aka SQL + File servering + IIS)

All the real guts of my home network are in the VMs which are stored on a seperate drive and backedup. And wow, did my Domain Controllerbitch about that one. It had the AD store on a seperate vhd was attached via SCSI rather than the IDE interface. Had to boot up into directory recovery mode and let windows reinstall the SCSI hdd and network card. After that it was just some maintance to finish migrating from my Win2k3 DC to Win2k8r2 DC.

WSUS gave me a little trouble as the host box kept trying to talk to the WSUS instance when I was trying to reinstall it.

Now that I've got the host box running Win2k8r2, I can update my backup scripts to produce a .vhd file which gets mounted at start up rather than copy all the individual user files for backups.

[Spyder]

What does your home network do that you're at the point where you need WSUS to manage updates?

Not that I'm not impressed, just curious.

SCCM is a piece of shit.[/unrelated rant]

[Xon]

Home fileserver with several VMs, 3-4 laptops/desktops depending on if friends are over generally with at least 2-3 copies of the same OS.

I've got a vpn to a remote box which does backups which runs win2k8 and also gets updates pushed to the VM running on it (2nd Domain Controller). I'm planning on rebuilding the host in a few months and will probably add some more VMs too.

[Spyder]

Fun fact; You're running more sophisticated disaster recovery then some government departments.

[Chris OFarrell]

Yeah, I'd have to say it sounds like overkill for a home LAN, but thats just me.

Doing an In Place upgrade of a Microsoft Server between OS versions just sounds like a bad idea IMHO, despite how similar a lot of the core and Kernal is between the two. Still, it sounds like you have everything well backed up which is a big plus...

[Xon]

Fun fact; You're running more sophisticated disaster recovery then some government departments.

Saddly that doesn't suprise me. VMs however make backing stuff up vastly easier. Just take an entire snapshot and export the VM's configuration. Sure it requires more disk space, but that is a fairly trivial problem to solve in the face of +1tb hdds these days.

The major issue is I just don't have the hardware todo test runs of the recovery process except when I actually need to. Which is anoying as hell.

Yeah, I'd have to say it sounds like overkill for a home LAN, but thats just me.

Doing an In Place upgrade of a Microsoft Server between OS versions just sounds like a bad idea IMHO, despite how similar a lot of the core and Kernal is between the two. Still, it sounds like you have everything well backed up which is a big plus...

I've got a task in task scheduler stuck with an missing XML element which bugs me everytime I open the task scheduler console and I've got some strange error message which have poped up in the event log which appear to have stopped. I may just reformat the entire thing and rebuild again.