Quick Fix : Operations are in Progress, Please wait.
July 30, 2012 16 Comments
First day back from holiday today, and already blog post fodder is flying at me.
I have seen this issue reported on the forums a few times, but only ever seen it myself once on a Windows 7 desktop machine, when an Acronis image was in progress.
I came back to find an open ticket regarding a user account rename, and subsequent problems accessing the mailbox. Of course i tried to RDP to the Exchange server to check some things, but the RDP would instantly fail, no error, just bounce straight back to the connect prompt. Hmm i thought.
Email was still flowing, OWA was still up, so the server was working.
So i fired up an MMC and connected to the server via Computer Management. the System log was full of errors, and the application log was not happy either, but no obvious silver bullet reason for the server to be non responsive to RDP and still serve email.
Ok i thought, time to use the DRAC (Dell Remote Access Card) which will give me console level access.
I was greeted with this screen.
Hm, i thought.
I flipped over to the Services console via the MMC and noticed that the Acronis Scheduler service was ‘Stopping’
Ok i thought, well, lets kill this bad boy. (yes i said bad boy)
Luckily on the server i was using i had already downloaded PsTools, if you have never used PsTools you really should.
If you are a domain administrator, you can have a huge amount of fun killing annoying applications on Co-Workers computers and making it look like an application has crashed. I never got tired of killing our interns IE sessions when they were on Facebook instead of working, and you can even write a small bat file to run at random just to add a little more authenticity to it. Oh, i digress.
Ok, so first i found the name of the process the Scheduler service used via the MMC.
Next, i turn to PsTools and use the PsList command.
PsList \\server | findstr Schedul2
I use the ‘findstr’ tool also here to filter the output of the PsList command so i only see the relevant process running.
This confirms that yes, this process is running on the target server.
Next i can use PsKill to end that process.
PsKill \\server Schedul2
As soon as the process was killed, the DRAC screen updated to ‘stopping services’ and the server finished it’s reboot.
Hopefully this will help you troubleshoot any ‘Operations are in progress’ messages you see on your servers.
About Robert Pearman
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This has been bugging me for months. I remotely restart this server which is critical for a 12 x 7 business. I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning waiting for the server to restart. Finally tonight before I left the office I setup the DRAC and saw (and googled) the message on the screen. Your instructions were spot on and after the server restarted like expected.
Right on the money. This should be published under “10 best Server 2008 tips of all time”!
Hi Robert,
you made may day!
Sitting here 300 Kilometers away from my customers server and only wantet the machine to reboot after installing some Microsoft updates. I’m dealing with this problem since months on various customer servers and gave up looking for an Acronis solution.
Now I was so pissed because I need to do some work on this machine during the weekend and could not just press the on/off button to restart the remote server in a locked server room far away from my place.
So I started another Google research and found your helpful workaround using PSTools.
Thaks a lot for posting it!
If you are in Hamburg / Germany I’ll pay for the beers! ;-)
Regards
Andreas
This really should be one of the first hits on a Google search for “operations are in progress” this was it!
We’re uninstalling Acronis completely and installing StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect. Too many corrupt backups and horrible customer service.
Thanks again for this great post!
Matt
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!! You saved my life! I can sleep tonight because of this post.
-Matt
Yeah, i really should charge for this stuff :)
Thanks this helped a lot finally I can get to sleep server is now rebooting.
Thanks a lot.
They, thanks, had exactly the same problem, and your blog helped me. Just FYI, instead of using PStools which is depreciated, I used taskkill which is part of 2008. taskkill /? and you can just specify the process name (even with a wildcard if you can remember exact spelling) and it will hunt down the pid and kill them.
Thanks for you info, great help!
Best solution ever. After changing my home media server from an Intel based CPU to an AMD-FX based CPU I had to reinstall Windows 7 ANYWAYS despite Acronis’ claim about Universal Restore being universal…right. Nothing but blue-screens after using that to backup and migrate. I finally reinstalled but my original DVD didn’t have SP1 which is CRUCIAL for AMD based systems and after installing SP1 I was getting the Operations in Progress screen eternally.
Good thing I found your blog or I’d still be waiting, who wants to force an ATX hard shut down on a PC that has just finished installing a service pack?
Acronis is off my list for a while, I was going to buy the 2014 Home edition but after this SNAFU with 2011 I think I’ll go find something else: UNINSTALLED.
This works PERFECTLY! Thank you so much. I use Dameware which is much like PSTools, but maybe better and more expensive… lol Anyway, killing this process took seconds and saved me from having to drive 30 minutes in white-out conditions!
This happened with me with Acronis 2014 (I only installed it to make a bootable USB device). PSList would not work to my NB, but PSKill killed the process fine, and the shutdown then continued. Thanks!
Hours of work reduced to 5 minutes. Thanks.
Thank you this helped. I had to add the -u user -p password arguments (access denied)
Reblogged this on Title (Required).
Thanks a lot, it saved lot of time
You’re a STAR!