I have a real love-hate relationship with Symantec. I love some of their corporate products. Backup Exec has so many features, the price is very competitive, I like how they license their Hyper-V Agent (though SBS Edition should include one…) and when it works, it works really well… But it doesn’t work really well, usually. It’s prone to weird errors and things will just stop working until you restart services or reboot servers or pause and unpause your server or put a device back online. Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 AKA Norton Ghost with a Higher Price Tag is a fantastic program. It’s my go-to P2V solution, the backup and recovery works well and is easy to manage.

Except for the whole there’s-this-known-issue-where-your-server-will-BSOD-when-you-first-use-it thing. Yeah, that thing. Because I always have to look through Google for this link, I’m posting it here. Maybe someone else will find it and it will help them. This link has the basics though all it really does is link to the MS KB with the hotfix, which is http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980856. This page gives more details and pertains to BESR and BE2010 installed on the same machine. Symantec isn’t too clear about why this happens other than to say that the problem is the Symantec VSS Writer.

I had a lot of fun fixing this last night when the password to extract the MS hotfix didn’t work. Wonderful! I remembered I left the MSU file on another client’s desktop, the only nice thing about needing to install this all the time, so I popped in, emailed it to myself, downloaded, installed, rebooted, and all was good! But this shit is still shit and I’m tired of shit.