Auto Copy CD’s, DVD’s, & Optical Media To Disk

PowerShell, Scripting, , ,

Some time ago I decided to backup (to disk) and eliminate my massive optical media collection, but there just wasn’t any good software out there that would copy discs quickly and in a somewhat automated fashion with a single optical drive setup. I wrote the PowerShell script at the end of this post to copy discs with RoboCopy quickly and efficiently. You will need to adjust some of the settings in the USER VARIABLES section such as which drive to monitor, time to run, etc. After the “User Vars” match your config, run the script. It will wait for a disc to be inserted, immediately begin copying to your specified location, then once the disc has been copied, the drive will eject the disc (if it can.) Pull that disc out, insert a new one, and the process will repeat for as long as you have specified!

Prerequisites:

  1. Run on a Windows machine with PowerShell installed, patched, and updated correctly
  2. Have robocopy in your path. Download and install this if you haven’t already. A recommended version is currently available on my site here.
    1. PowerShell’s ExecutionPolicy is set correctly
    2. Run: “Get-ExecutionPolicy” to get the current policy. Likely will be set to Restricted
    3. Run: “Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned”
    4. Select Yes with the Pop-up prompt
    5. If that doesn’t work…
      1. Run: “Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted”
        Please research and understand the implications and potential security risks by running in this mode.
  3. I also recommend having PowerGUI Script Editor installed and running (note Dell owns PowerGUI now…)
    1. http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/powergui/m/bits/20439049
  4. You can Download the Script Here.

Happy copying!
–Mike

ScaleIO SDS Components Selection Greyed Out – Solved

ScaleIO, ,

<Solved> Problem:
EMC ScaleIO SDS Components Select Devices Greyed Out. This is on the Add devices to SDSs step when using the ScaleIO for VMware Installation Wizard (Deploy ScaleIO environment from the main ScaleIO plugin page) as can be seen in the following screenshot:
emc_scaleio_sds_component_device_selection_greyed_out

Solution:
On the main EMC ScaleIO page within the Web Client click on Advanced Settings on the right as shown here:

emc_scaleio_advanced_setting_section

Now select the first check box: Enable VMDK creation. If you want to use RDMs, also select Enable RDMs on non Parallel SCSI controllers. Screenshot:

emc_scaleio_advanced_settings_pop_up

In my case, I was now able to proceed with the deployment!

Another little trick, if you’ve closed out of the deployment wizard, your progress will be saved. When you click on “Deploy ScaleIO environment” again, it gives you the option to resume where you left off, which is a nice time saver.

Good luck,
Mike

VMware ESXi – Two filesystems with the same UUID have been detected – Solved

VMware, , ,

The Error:
“Two filesystems with the same UUID have been detected. Make sure you do not have two ESXi installations”

Troubleshooting:

I recently got the above error and PSoD (Purple Screen of Death [similar to a BSOD in the VMware world…]) after a fresh install of VMware ESXi v5.5 u2a on a newly built white box.

The information found at this VMware KB was not helpful, in my case, aside from allowing me to reboot and finish booting into ESXi successfully:

  1. Restart the system.
  2. During the reboot, when the hypervisor screen appears, press Shift+O.
  3. In the boot option, type overrideDuplicateImageDetection and press Enter.

While I was able to boot in ESXi via the GUI, shell, SSH, and vCenter with no errors using this method, the PSoD reoccurs when you reboot. The various methods mentioned around the web didn’t work for me to FIX not workaround the problem.

The Fix:

Delete any partitions that remain on drives you’re not using.

My Method:

  1. Take notes about the drive where ESXi is installed (whether logical or physical) and any other Datastores you want to keep – the drive sizes will be your biggest giveaway.
  2. Go get yourself a fresh copy of the GParted Live Bootable CD ISO here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/
  3. Burn the ISO to a fresh blank CD
  4. Boot your ESXi box to the CD and let GParted load
  5. At the top right walk through each of the drives. If any partitions remain on drives you don’t want, delete all of the partitions on the drive.
  6. Make sure to apply all of your changes
  7. Reboot

In my case this completely solved the PSoD and the system is happy.

Good Luck,
Mike

P.S. If you get the following error when trying to create a datastore:

Call "HostStorageSystem.ComputeDiskPartitionInfo" for object "storageSystem-10" on vCenter Server "vcenter01" failed.

Cleaning off the old partitions will likely clear this issue as well.