Restoring administrative tools shortcuts

In this article, we will see how to restore missing shortcuts in the Administrative Tools folder in Windows These services should be used by developers and administrators. Computer Management - Allows to manage various options of local or remote computers with a consolidated user interface. It allows you to maintain file systems, view logs and manage users and system services. This tool includes a number of tools which available separately in the Administrative Tools folder.

Defragment and Optimize Drives - While Windows automatically defragments drives as part of regular maintenance, this tool allows you to execute the defragmentation manually.

Disk Cleanup - Use this tool to remove temporary files, old logs, empty the Recycle Bin, and delete redundant Windows Update files. Event Viewer - View system and application logs. System Configuration - This tool, known as msconfig. System Information - Shows information about the computer, its OS and hardware. This tool as also known as msinfo Task Scheduler - This tool allows the user to schedule apps and tools to run automatically.

Windows Firewall with Advanced Security - Allows to change options for the built-in Firewall app on local or remote computer using the advacned user interface. If some of your Administrative Tools shortcuts are missing, for example, if you've accidentally deleted them or a third-party tool or malware damaged them, you can restore them by downloading the default shortcuts and placing them to the right folder.

Here is how. How to Open Administrative Tools in Windows Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:. If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support! Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software.

Follow him on Telegram , Twitter , and YouTube. View all posts by Sergey Tkachenko. Your email address will not be published. I might be reinstalling the server and choose its updates more carefully, but I'd prefer not to, 'cause the server is working correctly otherwise.

Thanks for your update. Please try another user account, same result? I see that you have checked non-Microsoft services via msconfig, it is still recommended to disable all these services as suggested. I did try with different user accounts with same result. What might this indicate? The reason I'm not too willing to disable the services is because most of them are anti-virus related. I did however disable all the non-microsoft and non-anti-virus services with no result. This has happened to me twice now on the same server, I run about 60 windows server and R2 servers with various applications and only this deployment server has the problem, so i think it is somthing to do with that.

I have tried looking in the event viewer and also tried everything in this post including removing the non MS servcies and nothing seems to work. Also having the same problem: Start menu shortcuts are missing, Administrative tools is empty and I'm getting a "Location not available"-error message when trying to open Administrative tools from the Control panel:.

It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or on a network. Check to make sure that the disk is properly inserted, or that you are connected to the internet or your network, and then try again.

If it still cannot be located, the information might have been moved to a different location. No folder named Start Menu! I am also having the same problem described here. I never really guessed my "Server Manager. Ink" missing was a BIG problem for a week, until I went to try and figure out why this error occurs when I log into the local Admin. We don't have any other users that log into this machine, and I don't really want to try a new user when I already know it won't work based off of everyone else's comments here.

As people before me have stated. I'm guessing a bad patch? I keep our server up-to-date as possible, but without installing features I don't need. Keep in mind I didn't do anything. It's true, that you can make the administrative tools appear via the "start menu", but it will be gone when you log on the next time. Most of our servers are virtualized under citrix xen. Also the setting "don't show this screen And no - we don't have mandatory profiles.

You won't believe what happened in a production environment, when a users asked me to reboot one of the VM's When I restarted the vmms service, I got an error saying "could not find the file specified". Then I saw that the Administrative Tools menu was completely empty. Win7 has NLA support, but I was unable to logon. This is where the InitialStore. This is about 30 MB, so you'll have all the missing files within seconds.

We have the same exact problem. We just opened a case with Microsoft. We have Windows R2 Standard. It happens twice. Doing so, I lost all my Snapshots. The second time it happens NOW , I can't afford losing my vm's snapshots. So they know theres an issue and they're building a patch yet they leave this crap up so people can hose their servers. Makes sense to me. I have the same issue. After the last lot of windows updates the start menu is missing. To resolve the issue did the following:. Is there a patch I can roll back to resolve this issue?

I blocked windows updates from applying, restored it back before the updates and it's been fine since then. Meanwhile, there is only one item KB on the installed update list. I have tried logging in as local administrator, another domain admin user, but still cannot get Administrative menu back.

I searched entire local drives, but no result shows "Windows Deployment Service" or "Microsoft Deployment Toolkit" shortcut. This has just happened to me as well, has anyone came to a conclusion to this? I'm using r2 standard VM. Things started falling over pretty quickly, I received a snap in error whilst using deployment work bench then everything because very unresponsive so rebooted, after reboot received the Remote Desktop NLA error, so accessed it via VSphere and reduced RD NLA setting.

Now everything is extremely unresponsive and administrative tools is missing. I don't particularly want to rebuild the server with finding a fix as i suspect it will just happen again. Has anyone had any luck with resolving this issue??? FWIW, I'm having the same problem. That seemed to get PXE back working.

Staff could no longer log on to the network as printers on this particular server could not be allocated during login script froze. Removed printers from login script and staff could then login. Started up a replica and restored all I could from the replica and rebooted.

This fixed most of the issues and I could re-enable printer allocation in the login script and it fixed a whole bunch of other applications running on the server that were also failing. The NLA error still exists so I have turned this off on the server but it does raise a question as to what else isn't working on the server that I am yet unaware of?

I got these permisssions by examining the replica machine before the update applied. I've seen something similar working with Double-Take repositories but conceivably the problem could occur in any number of scenarios - particularly where there may be a backup copy of some system locations involved. As part of tidying up a backup job I manually removed a number of repository folders from our target servers.

The folders included the system state from other machines including all the Windows junctions that are used to link to Documents and Settings etc. The junctions were from another machine but it looks as though they were still referring to the local path. When you delete a junction in Explorer the target folder is left intact, however when the reclebin is emptied the target folder is removed! So hopefully this will explain how the problem occurs - even if not exactly why in a given case Thanks, this fix worked for me.

Admin tools on the start menu was re-populated and likewise he link in control panel. This occurred after I did a windows update last night which at some point failed but all the servers roles Note that this occurred after I did a windows update last night, some point some or all failed and it rolled back the updates.

Thankfully all the servers roles are all working as normal AD domain controller, dhcp, dns, hyper-v, dlna etc. Its just my server at home and I'm running the most recent windows 10 preview release on a VM and it is looking good and even 'Project Spartan' looks interesting as does the 3D printing app.

We have been successfully running Server R2 with WDS and MDT Update 2 as a Linux KVM Virtual machine for a couple of years now, however, having read this thread and others on the net this seems to be a widespread issue , I am not convinced this is a problem with virtual machines. Yesterday, I logged in via remote desktop as I usually do. The MDT Workbench MMC crashed while I was trying to edit two task sequences at the same time and would no longer start up successfully so I unsuspectingly rebooted, only to find as others have that I could no longer remote desktop to the server as I was now getting the NLA required error.

On logging in to the virtual console, it was apparent that most of the start menu, including the administrative tools shortcuts, was missing. There had been no windows updates for more than a week. So far everything appears back to normal - touch wood. This is an extremely worrying problem. If I hadn't noticed it had happened immediately it may not have been as easy to recover from it. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? Windows Server TechCenter.

Sign in. United States English. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Asked by:. Archived Forums. Windows Server General Forum. Sign in to vote. Does anyone have any ideas to might be the cause of this issue? Edited by pelleswe Monday, July 4, PM. Monday, July 4, AM. Hello, did you enable all required features for RSAT with add features?

The menu for Administrative Tools is entirely empty. Hi, According to your description, the issue occurs when you connect to the server via remote desktop. Refer to: 1. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread. Tuesday, July 5, AM. Hi Nina, thanks for your reply. Wednesday, July 6, AM. Hi, Thanks for your update. Monday, July 11, AM. Once again, thanks for the time and effort you're putting into this matter.

Monday, July 11, PM. Hi Have you had any luck with this i have the exact same problem but I have Server not R2 All shortcuts just have disappeared from all users and all default locations is there a way to fully reset the default windows profile folders This has happened to me twice now on the same server, I run about 60 windows server and R2 servers with various applications and only this deployment server has the problem, so i think it is somthing to do with that I have tried looking in the event viewer and also tried everything in this post including removing the non MS servcies and nothing seems to work thanks for any help.

Tuesday, August 23, AM. Any luck? I am having the same issue. Thanks, Chris. Thursday, August 25, PM. Any idea what's causing this?