SBS2003 Migration to 2008. Some problems along the way…..

Interesting error today on a migrated SBS2008 Machine in Group policy Management:

“The data present in the reparse point buffer is invalid”

Also, the SBS 2008 redirection utility would not function and was giving this error:

On top of that, this client had previously been running a folder redirection policy of their own which had been deleted in the group policies.    So what we ended up with was a scenario where not only were client machines not syncing the offline files to the correct location, but also there was no way for me to create a manual policy to stop that because of the above error.    Not good!

Because of the urgency of the scenario, the course of action I took to resolve this was to first have the engineer on site to remove all of the offline cached files that the clients were trying to sync with.    The best way to do this if you are sure you have a backup of the files on the server is to go into the control panel in windows, folder options, offline file tab….   then click CTRL + SHIFT + Click the Delete Files button.   Wait for the message to restart, click yes.  Now that the client machines were no longer giving an offline error and were happy working away on the online versions of the files, I moved onto the bigger issue with Microsoft technical support.

The bigger issue…..

Now…  I had originally written down here a load of notes about various processes and procedures that I took with Microsoft support, but by the end of it all, it turned out to be a bug that is known but the fix is not available – yet.   So here it is….

There is a problem in the Windows 2008 operating system (not SBS) that means that if you add a File Screen in FSRM on the same drive as SYSVOL you will end up with the errors above, and maybe more GPO / AD issues.   So for the moment, don’t do that!   Microsoft are working on a hotfix to correct this.

If you have already done this, you should remove the file screen from FRSM (use the SBS wizard if you want) and then from the command prompt type:

fltmc detach Datascrn c:

Doing this will remove the file screen completely.

Hopefully this information will save someone from a day like I have just had!   As soon as a hotfix comes out, and a KB article (should not take too long) I will post it here (or maybe the SBS team / Windows Core team will link back to my blog)