Re: disaster recovery
From: Jeff Middleton [SBS-MVP] (jeff_at_cfisolutions.com)
Date: 03/29/04
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Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 08:33:17 -0600
The shortest sequence to restore the entire thing, if you have tape backup
of the C: drive, System State, and Exchange is going to be something like
this:
[The assumption below is that you do not have another DC or Exchange server
in this LAN. If you do, the sequence of recovery is slightly different.]
- A critical point in the restore process is going to be if you are using a
different motherboard type, different boot controller, different HAL. If so,
you may find that after doing the first restore of System State, your system
may be unusable. In that case, if your system is completely unbootable after
the restore, you would need to follow this with an in-place upgrade of the
system using the SBS media. You can try using the repair option with the
ERD, but you may well need to bypass the first prompt for repair, instead
indicate that you want to install the OS again. At the second point you are
prompted that "an existing installation of Windows has been located", you
would then choose to repair/inplace upgrade that install. The problem that
you would be dealing with here is specific to one of a couple of possible
issues. The worst scenario would be if the older server was such old
hardware as to not even be an ACPI type motherboard. In that instance, you
should forget about trying to do a system state restore, instead do a
scratch install of the SBS on the new server, using the same name and domain
name, and then attempt to remount the Exchange databases to the new server.
The second problem you could have would be a boot controller issue related
to using a different SCSI controller or boot configuration file that doesn't
match that of the original server. This can be corrected if you get a
message indicating "no boot device detected" rather than a BSOD on boot, or
a message to the affect of "the system folder is corrupted or missing".
- Install the base Windows 2000 Server portion of SBS using the same SBS
media as the original installation.
Note: it is criticial that your installation use the same system folder name
as before, therefore, if this installation previously was created with SBS
4.5 and then upgraded, you would need to use the C:\winnt.sbs name. If this
was a Windows 2000 Server that was migrated to SBS, you would use C:\winnt.
Whatever it was, you have to recreate that same folder name. If you don't
have the original media to do that automatically, you would have to build
boot floppies and alter the Winnt.sif file accordingly, or use an unattend
file.
= Keep in mind that you do not want to have your server connected to the LAN
or the web during this process. The very last step is to connect it to live
external network connections. Instead, you should have the NICs attached to
a hub/switch simply to activate the NIC, but not connect to other computers
or web.
= When you install the base Windows, it's not critical to use the very same
name for the server, but it doesn't hurt. Once you perform the System State
restore this will be corrected.
- Once you have the base Windows installation, it isn't necessary to
complete the balance of the SBS installation. It's not even necessary to do
the domain controller portion of the install. Basicaly, at the point the the
system boots from the local hard drive into Windows, and you have your tape
device drivers loaded, you have what you need to proceed.
- Identify the actual NIC you use for your primary LAN connection and
reconfigure it now for the correct IP and gateway information. Do the same
for a secondary NIC, if present. Once you have the hardware setup for NICs,
tape drive, and boot drives, you may need to install 3rd party tape backup
software (if you use it) in order to perform the restore. Make an ERD
(repair disk) at this point. This would be useful if the restore of the
system causes a non-boot condition. In addition, I recommend that you make a
boot floppy at this point and confirm that it works. This is valuable for
troubleshooting if the restore from backup causes a non-boot condition.
Follow normal installation steps to get to the point that you can do the
restore from tape.
- Run a full restore of the entire OS partition, plus the System State using
the DSRM boot option. You will need to select the option in your restore to
indicate this server as doing an Authoritative Restore. This forces the AD
information to update correctly. If you have trouble with this on your first
restore, you can once again reboot and perform the System State portion of
the restore from the same backup, using an Authoritative Restore option. You
will not be able to restore Exchange at the same time, because you haven't
installed it yet. :)
- Following the initial restore above, you will find that following the
reboot, you have a number of errors reported. The errors will be related to
several items that you now will correct.
- Verify that your primary NIC and secondary NIC still have the correct
settings, and that you do not have errors on these connections.
- Finish resolving any other hardware driver and operations connections.
- Create any additional drive partitions you will need to restore data
locations. You may want to restore the data now, or wait until later when
the server recovery is complete. Depending upon the amount of data, it's not
uncommon for a technician to complete the server recovery, then leave the
server restoring data overnight if the backup/restore sequence requires many
hours to finish.
- At this point, the hardware should all be working, but you probably will
have a number of issues related to SBS applications not working correctly.
This is caused by SFN errors (short filename) related to the System State
restore having put the registry back correctly, but the applications that
were restored into the Program Files subfolders not having matching SFNs.
There's nothing you could have done to prevent this. To correct it, you
should run the SBS application setup in maintenance mode to reinstall all
the SBS applications. You will be completing the steps normally done in a
first setup again in order to correct the SFN errors. However, all your
previous settings will be retained. If you customized the location of your
Exchange mdbdata folder, you may find that you need to correct this again
following the reinstall.
- After completing all the setup steps, reboot and then reapply all the
Service Packs and critical updates you would normally install on a new
server.
- You will probably still have errors reported from Exchange unable to mount
the IS. This is because you now have the Exchange program installed, but not
the Store.
- To recover the Exchange, you will want to stop all the Exchange Services,
then navigate to the location of the MDBdata folder. Delete the entire
contents of this folder. Now, start the Exchange Services again. Perform a
restore using your normal backup/restore program for the Priv/Pub. You can
follow normal Exchange documentation for recovery of an online/offline
backup, whichever applies to your situation.
Only at this point are you now ready to consider reconnecting the server to
the LAN and the web. If you connect your server to the web any sooner than
your Exchange is back to most current condition, you take a chance that the
server will accept incoming mail that will be deleted by the restore
process.
Finally, as far as server recovery steps go, if this recovery were due to an
upgrade or parallel server recovery, it's possible that you would have
incremental data and Exchange updates to complete. You would perform this
synchronization at this time.
With the steps above completed, you SBS should now be in a good working
condition. However, you will have rolled the SBS back to a previous date
period in history. It's likely that you will find that your workstations do
not logon to the server in a normal method, that they are reported to have
lost their domain trust agreement with the SBS. Don't worry, this is easy to
fix. At each workstation, complete a cycle of removing the workstation from
the domain, reboot, rejoin the domain with the same naming, and reboot
again. Do this for every workstation and member server in the network as
needed. This will not affect your user profiles.
"hakam qawas" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:1506201c41590$5b0143e0$a401280a@phx.gbl...
> i need information to restore my server.i have a complete
> system or server failure, the server had to be changed to
> a new hardware including hard disk,the os is sbs2000 with
> sp-4, CALs for 25 users Cexch2000 sp-3,isa was installed.
> back up for c drive and system state is available.
- Next message: Hollis D, Paul, [MVP - Outlook]: "Re: Can't Access company Web"
- Previous message: Alexandre: "Rights Problem"
- In reply to: hakam qawas: "disaster recovery"
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