I have seen some page hits to my blog where people are searching for “power shell code for ejecting CD drive” and landing at my post which describes the procedure using VBscript. So, posting the powershell equivalent code here for such peoples reference.

$items = (New-Object -com "WMPlayer.OCX.7").cdromcollection.item(0)            
$items.eject()            

The above code ejects a CD drive. If you have want to close the CD drive repeat the second statement again. If you have multiple CD drives, you need to play with array object in second line to eject/close a specific CD drive.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

I couldn’t find any MS link directly in Google search when I searched for it. I found link in few blogs/forums but that never worked. Fortunately, I got a working link from one of the blog and posting it help visitors of my blog.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en#filelist

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.

tags: RSAT for windows7, Windows7 RSAT

After reading labnol post, I felt why only Unix and why not windows. I did some search over internet and finally could able to tailer this script.

It works fine if you have only one CD-Drive. If you have multiple CD drives, then explore the options of the Object I am using in this script.

Set oWMP = CreateObject("WMPlayer.OCX.7" )
Set ArrCDROM = oWMP.cdromCollection
while (1)
wscript.sleep 3000
ArrCDROM.Item(0).Eject
wscript.sleep 3000
ArrCDROM.Item(0).Eject
wend

Write in comments section if you need any more clarity.

Happy learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Tags: Vbscript for ejecting CD-Drive, CD-Drive eject command, eject CD drive from command prompt.

WMI is a wonderful tool for remote administration!!!

Today in this post, I will demonstrate on how to query and terminate processes in remote machine using wmi command line utility (wmic). Ofcourse, you need have administrator rights on remote machine to run these command(may be a domain admin account is a right choice here).

In all these below examples, “myremote” is my remote machine name against which I am performing these operations.

To query all processes in remote machine use below command..

wmic /node:myremote process

To query a specific process(outlook.exe) in remote machine…

wmic /node:myremote process where name="outlook.exe"

If you are not sure of exact process name but know only few letters of it, then use this…

wmic /node:myremote process where "name like '%outlo%'" get name

To terminate(kill) a process…

wmic /node:myremote process where name="outlook.exe"  call terminate

To query the owner of a process…

wmic /node:myremote process where name="outlook.exe"  call getowner

Enough for today.. 🙂 I will post more command lines when I get some time…

If you want a command for any specific requirement, please leave a note below in comments section. I will get back to you ASAP.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Use below command if you want to get the CPU utilization of remote machine from command prompt. It’s very useful if you don’t want to spend time in logging on to the server to verify the stats. Needless to say, replace RemoteMachine with your remote machine name in below command.

typeperf “\RemoteMachineprocessor(_Total)% Processor Time”

Refer to my old article to know more about typeperf

Happy Learning…,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Do you want to make your USB drive as read-only? That means you want to disable write operations to USB?. There is a way to do this if your desktop has windows XP with SP2.

Procedure:
Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlStorageDevicePolicies registry key, and change the value of WriteProtect setting to 1 from 0

If you don’t find this registry key in your machine, copy the below code into a text file and save as DisableUSB.reg and execute it with admin rights.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlStorageDevicePolicies]
"WriteProtect"=dword:00000001

The above code does nothing but creating the required registry keys if they are not already present. You can disable write protection on USB device by setting the value back to ‘0‘. You will get a pop-up like below if you are trying to copy data to a write protected USB drive.

Refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457157.aspx#EAAA for more information

Happy Learning,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Comments and Questions are welcome……!!!

This is a general problem one will face when they use external USB storage. Most of the USB mass storage vendors, packs their disks with FAT32 formatting (not sure why). This limits us from copying a file which is more than 4GB. It’s a limitation with FAT32 partition. Another thing I noticed is, we cannot copy more than 100GB into a FAT32 formatted USB drive though the drive capacity is more than 100GB.

So, if your USB storage disk of any size more than 100GB, I prefer formatting it with NTFS before you really use it. If you already have some data in it, and cannot really copy it to somewhere for formatting, you can give a try with “covert” command which coverts your USB drive to NTFS from FAT32 without losing data. Try at your own risk, I cannot guarantee. Chose this utility if you really don’t care or don’t have a place to back up your data

Happy Learning,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Below piece of code helps to find the size of a file that you mention. This code can find the size of a local file, or a file on remote system. You need to give the full path of file to make it work.

$filepath="YOUR FILE PATH"

Get-ChildItem $filepath | ForEach-Object { Write-Host $_.name,==> ($_.Length/1MB).tostring("0.00")MB

Below piece of code helps you.

PS C:>Get-WmiObject -Computer MyRemoteHost Win32_OperatingSystem | select CSname, Caption, CSDVersion | fl