Troubleshooting Windows Home Server 2011 : Troubleshooting Device Problems

Windows Home Server has good support for most newer devices, and it’s likely that most major hardware vendors will take steps (eventually) to update their devices and drivers to run properly with Windows Home Server. If you use only recent, Plug and Play-compliant devices that are compatible with either Windows Home Server or Windows Server 2008, you should have a trouble-free computing experience (at least from a hardware perspective). Of course, putting trouble-free and computing next to each other is just asking for trouble. Hardware is not foolproof—far from it. Things still can, and will, go wrong, and, when they do, you’ll need to perform some kind of troubleshooting. (That’s assuming, of course, that the device doesn’t have a physical fault that requires a trip to the repair shop.) Fortunately, Windows Home Server also has some handy tools to help you both identify and rectify hardware ills.

Troubleshooting with Device Manager

Windows Home Server stores all its hardware data in the Registry, but it provides Device Manager to give you a graphical view of the devices on your system. To display Device Manager, first use either of the following techniques:

• Select Start, Control Panel, System (or click Start, right-click Computer, and then click Properties), and then click Device Manager.
  
  
• Select Start, right-click Computer, and click Manage. In the Computer Management window, click the Device Manager branch.
  
  

Device Manager’s default display is a tree-like outline that lists various hardware types. To see the specific devices, click the arrow to the left of a device type. For example, opening the Network Adapters branch displays all the network adapter drives attached to your computer, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Device Manager organizes your computer’s hardware in a tree-like hierarchy by hardware type.

Device Manager not only provides you with a comprehensive summary of your system’s hardware data, it also doubles as a decent troubleshooting tool. To see what I mean, check out the Device Manager tab shown in Figure 2. See how the icon for the Standard VGA Graphics Adapter device has an exclamation mark superimposed on it? This tells you that there’s a problem with the device.

Figure 2. The Device Manager uses icons to warn you if a device has a problem.

If you examine the device’s properties, as shown in Figure 3, the Device Status area tells you a bit more about what’s wrong. As you can see, the problem here is that the device won’t start. Either try Device Manager’s suggested remedy or click the Check for Solutions button to see whether Microsoft has a fix for the problem.

Device Manager uses three different icons to indicate the device’s current status:

• A black exclamation mark (!) on a yellow field tells you that the device has a problem.

• A red X tells you that the device is disabled or missing.

• A blue i on a white field tells you that the device’s Use Automatic Settings check box (on the Resources tab) is deactivated and that at least one of the device’s resources was selected manually. Note that the device might be working just fine, so this icon doesn’t indicate a problem. If the device isn’t working properly, however, the manual setting might be the cause. (For example, the device might have a DIP switch or jumper set to a different resource.)

If your system flags a device but you don’t notice problems, you can usually get away with just ignoring the flag. I’ve seen lots of systems that run perfectly well with flagged devices, so this falls under the “If it ain’t broke” school of troubleshooting. The danger here is that tweaking your system to try to get rid of the flag can cause other—usually more serious—problems.

Troubleshooting Device Driver Problems

Other than problems with the hardware, device drivers are the cause of most device woes. For example, because Windows Home Server 2011 is a 64-bit operating system, it’s possible that a device doesn’t even have 64-bit drivers available. However, even a 64-bit driver can cause trouble, and this is true even if your device doesn’t have one of the problem icons that I mentioned in the previous section. That is, if you open the device’s properties sheet, Windows Home Server may tell you that the device is “working properly,” but all that means is that Windows Home Server can establish a simple communications channel with the device. So if your device isn’t working right, but Windows Home Server says otherwise, suspect a driver problem. Here are a few tips and pointers for correcting device driver problems:

• Reinstall the driver— A driver might be malfunctioning because one or more of its files have become corrupted. You can usually solve this by reinstalling the driver. Just in case a disk fault caused the corruption, you should check for errors in the partition where the driver is installed before reinstalling .

• Upgrade to a signed driver— Unsigned drivers are accidents waiting for a place to happen in Windows Home Server, so you should upgrade to a signed driver, if possible. How can you tell whether an installed driver is unsigned? Open the device’s properties sheet, and display the Driver tab. Signed driver files display a name beside the Digital Signer label, whereas unsigned drivers display Not digitally signed instead. 

  Note

  How is it possible to install an unsigned driver when 64-bit Windows operating systems (such as Windows Home Server 2011) require driver signing? It’s possible because you can turn off mandatory driver signing (for example, to install an unsigned driver that you really need to use). You do this using the Local Group Policy Editor, which you start by select Start, typing gpedit.msc, and then pressing Enter. Open the User Configuration, Administrative Templates, System, Driver Installation branch, and then double-click the Code Signing for Device Drivers policy. Select the Enabled option, use the list to choose Ignore, and then click OK.

  
  

• Disable an unsigned driver— If an unsigned driver is causing system instability and you can’t upgrade the driver, try disabling the device. Right-click the device, and then click Disable.

• Use the Signature Verification Tool— This program checks your entire system for unsigned drivers. 

• Try the manufacturer’s driver supplied with the device— If the device came with its own driver, try either updating to the manufacturer’s driver or running the device’s setup program.

• Download the latest driver from the manufacturer— Device manufacturers often update drivers to fix bugs, add new features, and tweak performance. Go to the manufacturer’s website to see whether an updated driver is available. 

• Try Windows Update— The Windows Update website often has updated drivers for downloading. Select Start, All Programs, Windows Update and let the site scan your system. Then click the Driver Updates link to see which drivers are available for your system.

• Roll back a driver— If the device stops working properly after you update the driver, try rolling it back to the old driver.

Tips for Downloading Device Drivers

Finding device drivers on the World Wide Web is an art in itself. I can’t tell you how much of my life I’ve wasted rooting around manufacturer websites trying to locate a device driver. Most hardware vendor sites seem to be optimized for sales rather than service, so although you can purchase, say, a new printer with just a mouse click or two, downloading a new driver for that printer can take a frustratingly long time. To help you avoid such frustration, here are some tips from my hard-won experience:

• If the manufacturer offers different sites for different locations (such as different countries), always use the company’s “home” site. Most mirror sites aren’t true mirrors, and (Murphy’s Law still being in effect) it’s usually the driver you’re looking for that a mirror site is missing.

• The temptation when you first enter a site is to use the search feature to find what you want. This works only sporadically for drivers, and the site search engines almost always return marketing or sales material first. Note, too, that occasionally these searches are case-sensitive, so bear that in mind when you enter your search text.

• Instead of the search engine, look for an area of the site dedicated to driver downloads. The good sites have links to areas called Downloads or Drivers, but it’s far more common to have to go through a Support or Customer Service area first.

• Don’t try to take shortcuts to where you think the driver might be hiding. Trudge through each step the site provides. For example, it’s common to have to select an overall driver category, and then a device category, and then a line category, and then the specific model you have. This is tedious, but it almost always gets you where you want to go.

• If the site is particularly ornery, the preceding method might not lead you to your device. In that case, try the search engine. Note that device drivers seem to be particularly poorly indexed, so you might have to try lots of search text variations. One thing that usually works is searching for the exact filename. How can you possibly know that? I’ve had good luck using Google (www.google.com), Google Groups (groups.google.com), or some other web search engine to search for a driver. Chances are someone else has looked for your file and will have the filename (or, if you’re really lucky, a direct link to the driver on the manufacturer’s site).

• When you get to the device’s download page, be careful which file you choose. Make sure that it’s a 64-bit Windows Home Server (or Windows Server 2008 R2) driver, and make sure that you’re not downloading a utility program or some other nondriver file.

• When you finally get to download the file, be sure to save it to your computer rather than opening it. If you reformat your system or move the device to another computer, you’ll be glad you have a local copy of the driver so that you don’t have to wrestle with the whole download rigmarole all over again.

Verifying Digitally Signed Files

I mentioned earlier that digitally unsigned drivers are often the cause of system instabilities. To ensure that you don’t accumulate unsigned drivers on your system, you should regularly run the Signature Verification tool. This program scans your entire system (or, optionally, a specific folder) for unsigned drivers. Follow these steps to run this tool:

When the verification is complete, the program displays a list of the unsigned driver files, if any. The results for all the scanned files are written to the log file Sigverif.txt, which is copied to the C:\\Windows folder when you close the window that shows the list of unsigned drivers. In the Status column of Sigverif.txt, look for files listed as Not Signed. If you find any, consider upgrading these drivers to signed versions.