Thursday, June 15, 2006
Fixing problems with WMI
Sometimes (rarely though) you will have a case where the WMI repository gets corrupted, and when you have a script that attempts to run, you get a Null Exception or something like that. Anyway, that's what I got a couple of times today when I deployed a script that applies a few registry changes using the root\default:StdRegProv class, and I got a couple of reports of it erroring. I didn't initially know any better, but I thought that maybe the StdRegProv class didn't exist in Windows XP SP1 (hence the Null Reference), but that wasn't the case, because it worked on some other SP1 machines. It wasn't until I tried connecting to the root\cimv2 namespace on the couple of affected machines that I understood what was going on; the WMI repository was corrupt. Here's a quick way of testing if there's a problem with WMI:
Refresh the WMI Repository
- Goto Start --> Run ... --> type wbemtest --> hit Enter
- In the Tester utility, press Connect
- Type root\cimv2 in the top-left box where by default it says root\default
- Press Enter
Refresh the WMI Repository
- Goto Start --> Run ... --> type net stop winmgmt --> press enter
- Input Y, if prompted --> press Enter
- Open Windows Explorer ([Windows] + E, keyboard shortcut) and navigate to %WINDIR%\System32\wbem\repository
- Delete all the contents of the wbem\repository folder
- Goto Start --> Run ... --> type net start winmgmt --> press enter
- Goto Start --> Run ... --> type wbemtest --> press enter
- Press the connect button
- Type root\cimv2 in the upper-left box
- Press Enter
