Oh man!  Are you tired of this giant screw-up with OneDrive (formerly known as SkyDrive)?  I’m tired of wasting my time with MS and reading their non-solutions.  When I found syncDriver referenced in the link above, I decided this might be the fix I’m looking for.  It’s small, it’s simple…and it’s an application…not a part of the operating system!

I installed it, fired it up, told it where to sync the files (c:\users\rwright\onedrive) in a folder I provisioned myself, and it was off to the races!

Look!  It has a user interface!  It actually tells you what’s going on!

Cool…options!  Exactly what you would expect.

And…oh boy…wait for this!  You can choose the folders you want to sync!

Need some proxy-ing to get in/out of your environment?  Thar it is!

Look, it’s in your tray…because it is…wait for it…an application!

And look-ee here.  It’s got a right-click menu…just like a reel application!

So far, so good.  More to come.

2014-06-25 Update:

syncDriver is operating well and I have moved all my documents from my “broken” SkyDrive folder in my old user profile to my new OneDrive, powered by syncDriver, folder in my new user profile.  I used WinDiff to compare the two directories to validate I wasn’t missing anything…except for those in the old SkyDrive folder that hadn’t been kept up-to-date.

2015-07-17 Update:

Okay, now to turn off the original OneDrive sync completely refer to this article.  Basically you are editing this registry setting.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Skydrive]
"DisableFileSync"=dword:00000001

2016-05-12 Update:

Well, my OneDrive has been broken on my Yoga for several months and I just got to looking at it.  syncDriver could not log into my OneDrive account.  However, my OneDrive account and my credentials were just fine.  I was getting an error, “Your IT department made a change that prevents you form syncing your personal OneDrive on this computer” when I viewed the OneDrive settings.  I uninstalled syncDriver, thinking I was going to get rid of it and try to go back to the MS OneDrive sync, but then found there’s a group policy that might be causing the problem.

In gpedit.msc (Group Policy editor) find this:  Local Computer Policy | Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | OneDrive | Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage.  The default for me was Not Configured.  I changed it to Disabled and that appears to have made OneDrive available again. 

I re-installed syncDriver and it immediately started syncing once again.  Yay!

Best I can tell, moving the location of your OneDrive folder from one user profile folder to another doesn’t work.

Navigating to my SkyDrive (OneDrive) folder in my former user profile (c:\users\Russell)…

And attempting to change it to my new profile location, c:\users\rwright\onedrive…

Selecting “Yes…”

After a little while of Windows churning…

Just FYI, I’ve tried moving it to a folder named SkyDrive and OneDrive and both give the same results.

If it can’t be moved here, where can it be moved?  And why?

Here’s the response:

The reference for moving a OneDrive folder is exactly what I tried to do.

And more FAQ information:

So, what I want to do is use a new domain account for logging on to my PC and simply “link” my domain account to my existing OneDrive account.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal, does it?  Worked fine on Windows 7.

And then, in this OLD response, Edmond_A says to use the “Unlink” function, which of course he doesn’t detail where one finds it or how one runs it, but I can only assume it’s for Windows 7, since it’s so old.

If you go online, you can see how to remove PCs, but this appears to be for fetching files and is no longer supported on Windows 8.1, so this appears to be a dead end.  I’ll go ahead and remove Tabula from the list of PCs.

So if I go to the OneDrive settings, it is not obvious how to set an account for OneDrive to use.  Wouldn’t it make sense here to store the account OneDrive uses to log in?  Isn’t that how it worked on Windows 7?

When I look at my accounts under PC Settings on the metro side, it shows my domain account and my Microsoft account, but no where can I find how to link a OneDrive account back to my PC.

So my question remains.  How do I associate my domain account to my OneDrive account and move its current location, which is under my previous profile?  This should be easy, guys…

I installed a Samsung EVO 840 1TB SSD in our Dell R520 that is running ESXi.  We currently have 1TB RAID 0 and 2TB RAID 0 arrays made with Constellation ES.2 drives, so I thought I’d try an SSD to see how much "better-er" I could make it.

To make this work you can use a standard drive tray (purchased from eBay for $11.79) and a 3.5-to-2.5 SATA adapter (also purchased from eBay for $9.99). In this case, I installed a Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD that I also acquired from eBay ($445.00).

You can see I failed to peel off all the plastic protective coating on the adapter, but hopefully that won’t be a big deal.  Just be sure to install the two screws on the adapter and the SSD prior to installing the adapter in the drive tray!

I powered everything down and slid it in and then powered it all back up.  I probably didn’t need to do that (hot swap should work), but I wanted to compare the alignment of my adapter with one of the installed drives to make sure it looked like it was going to match up okay.  You never know when you use third party hardware.

Once you get the SSD installed, you can choose to make all or part of it a cache for VMWare to use.  You can set this in the Host Cache Configuration software setting in the Configuration tab of the vSphere client.

Right-clicking on the SSD and selecting Properties… will allow you to select the amount of space you want to use for a host cache.

So my goal was to move my SQL VM first.  There are many ways documented to do this, such as using the manual vmkfstools method, as documented in this thread by telecastle.  However, in my experience I’ve found it’s much easier to use VMWare vCenter Converter Standalone to move VMs around. 

So, let’s do this and see how it works.  One picture is worth 1000 words, so here are some pictures to document the process.

First, you need to get the s/w, if you don’t already have it.  Google "download vmware standalone converter" and you should find it here.  You’ll have to register and log in to access it.

We are starting a conversion process and selecting the source, which is an ESXi box.

Make sure the VM is powered off.

The destination is the same ESXi machine.

We need to give it a new name…and it can’t be the same as one in the current inventory.

Select the SSD datastore.  Note that, even though I don’t show it here, you should be careful about what Virtual machine version you choose.  I initially chose Version 10 (wasn’t paying attention) and found that the vSphere client can’t manage any VM over version 9.  Also, it can’t create a VM over version 8.  So, I decided to go back and convert my Version 10 to Version 8.

The job is almost ready to go.  You have one last time to make some edits.

Now we’re ready to start it!

And the job has been submitted and is off and running.  Now just sit back, relax, and exercise your patience.  I don’t know about you, but I much prefer this to the command line stuff.

Let’s say you are creating a new item form using SPD 2010 and you don’t have InfoPath because the company didn’t purchase the Enterprise version of SharePoint.  Your goal is to pass a URL parameter to the new item form from some other part of the SharePoint application you are building.  Perhaps the link that contains the URL parameter was created by a workflow (hint hint).

You insert the custom list form like this.

The goal is to move this field down to the end of the form to get it out of the way.

You select the row and cut it for repositioning to the end of the form.

Now you’ve got it at the bottom of your form.

Now you test your form (before adding the parameter to pass) and it "works" but it doesn’t correctly save the data in the field you relocated.

The correct way to do this is to delete the field row at the top, add a new row at the bottom and insert a new text field and bind it to the column.

Bind the Data field to the column and format it as a Text Box.

Under Options, select Parameters and add a New Parameter, giving it a name that is memorable for you.  Then, bind it to the Query String variable of your choice.

With your text box selected, find the text property and change it from @Fieldname to $Parametername.

If you don’t get the name correct, you’ll see an error displayed instead of your form.

If you want to hide the field completely on the form to eliminate any human intervention, add class=ms-hidden to the table row.

If you are tired of seeing that message that takes more time to dismiss than it does for the add-ons to start, you can disable it using the Group Policy editor.

Click your Start buttong and type gpedit.msc and press enter.

Navigate to the Internet Explorer folder under Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Internet Explorer.  On the right side double-click Disable add-on performance notifications.

Select Disabled and click OK.

At this point you might want to investigate the long list of other options and see what else you want to configure while you’re here!

Here’s how I setup BGInfo on Windows Server 2012.

I created a folder in the Program Files (x86) directory and copied the BGInfo.exe file to the folder.

I used the scheduler (Win-Q and start typing “Scheduler”) method to run BGInfo.  Here are my scheduler settings.  The important thing here is to specify an account with administrative privileges. 

For triggers, I used the following.  I have it run on a schedule so it is updated regularly, in case things change.  I also have it run at each logon and at startup.  I think I have all the bases covered.

The action is, of course, Start a program.  The full command line is as follows.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\BGInfo\Bginfo.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\BGInfo\Bginfo.bgi" /TIMER:0 /SILENT

I’ve always found it’s better to include the full path to the BGInfo.bgi file.

The settings are pretty standard.  I always stop the task if it runs longer than 1 minute (plenty of time) in case something gets hung. 

That ought to do it.

Keywords:

Windows Server 2012
BGInfo
Automatic scheduled execution of BGInfo
BGInfo command line options