I had to recently perform an export of a bunch of virtual machines off a Windows Server 2008 host running Hyper-V when I came upon an error. Out of the many virtual machine guests running on that particular server, I managed to export most of the VMs, however when trying to export 3 of them, I got this error:

An error occurred while attempting to export the virtual machine.

Failed to create export directory.

Failed to create export directory with the name ‘D:\Backup\OIT2003DEV2 (73) \Virtual Hard Disks’ with error ‘The system cannot find the path specified.’(0×80070003): OIT2003DEV2 (73)  (FC56A6B8-2046-4670-9DAA-D72203098CFB)

Note: I have not tested this on an SP2 machine, so it may very well be that this error is fixed in SP2 or even in R2.

Luckily, I have also managed to work around this issue. Read below.

Steps to reproduce the problem:

In Hyper-V Manager, I right-clicked the virtual machine. Note that the VM was in shut-down state, and currently it did not have any snapshots associated with it.

I chose “Export”, and then browsed for a location for the exported VM. I have made sure that there was plenty of disk space available for the eport operation. File path wasn’t complex, and it even did not have spaces in it.

I then clicked on the “Export” button, and behold, the error appeared.

The Solution:

I have searched the Internet for a documented solution, but have yet to find one. Because the VM has worked well and without an error, I was confident that there wasn’t an issue with the VM’s hard disks. So I was just about to grab the VHD files of the VM, and create a new one using the old VHDs of the “bad” VM.

However, since there were other VMs waiting to be exported on the host, I figured that I should somehow mark the “bad” VM and flag it for action after I was done with the other VMs. So, I clicked on the VM’s name, and I simply added a few characters to the VM’s name. In this instance, I added “—” to the name.

After finishing the exporting of the other VMs, I returned to the “bad” VM. Just out of curiosity I tried to export the VM again.

Behold, somehow the addition of the “—” to the VM’s name has somehow “fixed” the export issue.

I do not know why the VM was “bad” in the first place and what has caused it to fail the export operation. I do not know why it got fixed, but it did. I just tried it with 2 more similarly troubled VMs, and it works.

Hope this helps someone.

One of the most mysterious aspects of black holes is their ability to shoot small, steady jets of matter into space near the speed of light. Until the sensitive infrared eyes of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope recently spotted one of these jets around a nearby neutron star, or super-dense dead star, black holes were the only known objects in the universe with this “talent.”

“For years, scientists suspected that something unique to black holes must be fueling the continuous compact jets because we only saw them coming from black hole systems. Now that Spitzer has revealed a steady jet coming from a neutron star in an X-ray binary system, we know that the jets must be fueled by something that both systems share,” said Dr. Simone Migliari of the University of California at San Diego. Migliari is the lead author of a paper that was published in the May 20, 2006 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A neutron star X-ray binary system occurs when a companion star orbits a dead star that is so dense all of its atoms have collapsed into neutrons, hence the name “neutron star.” The partner circles the neutron star the same way Earth orbits the Sun. Migliari used Spitzer to study a jet in one such system called 4U 0614+091. In this system, the neutron star is more than 14 times the mass of its orbiting companion.

As the smaller object travels around its massive partner, the neutron star’s intense gravity collects the material leaving its stellar companion’s atmosphere and creates a disk around itself. The disk of matter, or accretion disk, circles the neutron star similar to the way rings circle Saturn. According to Migliari, accretion disks and intense gravitational fields are characteristics that black holes and neutron stars in X-ray binaries share.

“Our data shows that the presence of an accretion disk and an intense gravitational field may be all we need to form and fuel a compact jet,” he said.

Typically, radio telescopes are the tool of choice for observing compact jets around black holes. At radio wavelengths, astronomers can isolate the jet from everything else in the system. However, because the compact jets of a neutron star can be more than 10 times fainter than those of a black hole, using a radio telescope to observe a neutron star’s jet would take many hours.

With Spitzer’s super-sensitive infrared eyes, Migliari’s team detected 4U 0614+091’s faint jet in minutes. The infrared telescope also helped astronomers infer details about the jet’s geometry. System 4U 0614+091 is located approximately 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Orion.

Other co-authors of this research include: John Tomsick of the University of California at San Diego; Elena Gallo University of California at Santa Barbra, Santa Barbra, Calif.; Gijs Nelemans of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands; and Thomas Maccarone, David Russell, and Rob Fender of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

Big stars usually aren’t shy about anything, not even death. At the end of their lives, they throw explosive tantrums, called supernovae, flinging abundant amounts of hot gas and radiation into space. Remnants of this cosmic fury can last for several thousand years and be easily detected by most telescopes used by professional astronomers.

But, not all stars like attention. Thirty thousand light-years away in the Cepheus constellation, astronomers think they’ve found a massive star whose death barely made a “peep.” Remnants of this shy star’s supernova would have gone completely unnoticed if the infrared eyes of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope hadn’t accidentally stumbled upon it.

“This source is really trying to avoid detection,” said Dr. Patrick Morris of NASA’s Herschel Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. He is the lead author of a paper on the discovery, which was published in the April 2006 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

So, what makes this lone star so unusual? Morris suspects that it sits away from the mobs of stars that occupy the main disk of our Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy’s disk is a crowded and dusty place, whereas the regions above and below are comparatively dust-free. It is this dust that allows exploding stars to be readily detected. Expelled material violently collides with surrounding dust, giving off bright light of various wavelengths. The putative supernova remnant discovered by Spitzer did not have enough dust around it to amplify its final death throes.

In fact, when Morris and his team first found this object, the thought that it could be a supernova remnant did not immediately cross their minds. The object was completely invisible to previous all-sky surveys taken by radio and X-ray telescopes. It did not even show up in visible-light images. Team members thought that the object was most likely a planetary nebula, or a star whose outer layers are gently puffed off in its last stages of life.

“There are various flavors of planetary nebulas; however, these objects normally have a bright star in the middle, a lot of dust, and a big range of chemistry. Our object shows none of this,” said Morris.

For two years the team sifted through astronomical archives, literature, and additional Spitzer data in hopes of determining what the source could be. After months of comparing Spitzer’s observations of the source to many examples from other object classes, Morris’ team carefully ruled out the possibility that the source could be anything other than a supernova remnant.

The team was further inclined to believe this theory when they found traces of oxygen in the region with Spitzer’s infrared spectrograph. Many known supernova remnants are surrounded by oxygen gas released from the cores of their aging stars.

Morris is currently planning to conduct deep radio observations of the object to confirm that it is indeed a supernova remnant. If his suspicions are correct, it will be the first supernova remnant ever to be discovered solely by its infrared properties. At 25 times the mass of our sun, the object will be among the three smallest and youngest remnants in the Milky Way.