Archive for the ‘Strange Issues’ Category

Missing Hard Drive Space on IBM Lenovo Laptop or Desktop??

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Today I had a new issue with an IBM Lenovo laptop that I had not seen before. I got a monitoring alert that there was only 1% free space on the c: drive. When I opened My Computer it showed the C: drive as 48GB total space. I had just installed a new 250GB hard drive less than a year ago so I knew this wasn’t right. I downloaded Treesize from JAM Software to see where the space had gone. It too showed the total size of the hard drive as 48GB, but down at the bottom it showed a folder called RRbackup on the root that was locked!

I assumed this was where my “lost” space had gone so I ran c:RRbackup and it said it wasn’t available. Not to worry, that’s why we have Knoppix and Hirens.

Once booted off the CD I was able to navigate to c:RRbackup and delete it. I booted back into Windows and Viola! c: was showing the correct size and free space.

The problem is a program called “Rescue and Recovery” on IBM Lenovo laptops. You can also start the program from the start menu and delete old restore points but sometimes that doesn’t work. I have also heard that booting into safe mode (F8) will also allow you to find and delete the folder and data but I have not tested this.

If you need more help, please contact me via the contact info on this website.

The item cannot be displayed in the reading pane. . .

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Let me start by saying this is the strangest issue I have ever seen. 

I guessing the reason you are here is because your Outlook won’t display your email messages and you searched for “The item cannot be displayed in the reading pane” and you want to know how to fix it. 

Specs:
IBM Lenovo Laptop
XP Pro
Outlook 2003
Exchange through Cisco VPN 

A new client has just signed a Managed Service contract for their servers, workstations and laptops. We installed our agents on all of their machines on a Friday. We installed our Managed Antivirus and Managed Backup solution (including offsite replication) and rebooted the machines, all but one, the Lenovo Laptop. We scheduled a script to prompt the user to reboot every 5 minutes, unfortunately it took them 3 days to reboot. It was then that the problem started. 

The agent for our Managed Services uses VNC so because of the time and location of the laptop we remoted in.  We could send/receive/reply to email messages however they would not open or display in the reading pane. Email messages would either not display at all or would show “The item cannot be displayed in the reading pane” error. If we double clicked the message to open it, it would be blank or would give an error message.  Our issue wasn’t limited to email or the reading pane. We couldn’t add contacts either. We could edit existing contacts, but not add new. The task list and calendar seemed to be unaffected.  OWA works perfectly fine.  

To fix this issue, we tried EVERYTHING listed below.  

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