Sean Wallbridge
Windows Server 2012 Upgrade to Server 2012 R2
The chaps in my office wanted to use the new version 2 Hyper-V VM’s on one of the hosts in our rack so I took it upon myself to upgrade one of our Server 2012 hosts to R2 (non DC). After some researching it looked pretty painless so I forged forward.
Pretty standard MS wizard install.
Going online to get updates worked fine, I have had instances where it caused issues, but not this time.
Selected my version.
It gave me the option to Upgrade so I took it!
It wouldn’t be a MS install if I didn’t fail at least one compatibility check and have to reboot at least once. In this case it was minor and a reboot fixed all.
Restarted and I’m moving forward to the boiler plate install warning.
And I’m off!
And boom, after a few reboots later I’m on an upgrade 2012 R2 server install.
Now onto see if everything worked, fist issue is Activation. The server is no longer activated, but I guess I should of seen this one coming. It didn’t like my 2012 key (Obv) so I plumbed in an R2 one and it was happy, Next!
Server Manager is complaining about its refreshes. saying “The system cannot access one or more event logs because of insufficient access right, file corruption, or other reasons”
The fix to this one for me was as follows. Fire up Regedit and go to…
HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionWINEVTChannels
Once there backup the registry key (just in case) DXPTaskRingTone/Analytic and then delete it.
Refresh the Server Manager and it should be all clean again. (thanks! source). Finally I did a few rounds of updates a few reboots and everything was green across the board.
All in all this was a pretty smooth upgrade, thanks Microsoft for making my life a little easier. This of course was a non DC install so I might change my tune later.
Great. That worked for us. And we did upgrade from Win2K8 to Win2K12R2.
Good to know, was it from basic win2k8 or R2?
Unbelievable that this was the one thing. I searched for hours looking for the right answer and just like you wrote I removed this key and everything went green after refreshing the Dashboard. Thank you so much.