Restore of Windows 2003 member server

flames1000

Hi,

We have a member server that went down. We lost 2 drives (1 in the mirror - OS) and (1 in the raid 5). The server is still operational, but the OS mirror will need to be redone as it turnes out that we do not have a drive of the same size for the mirror, so im going to reinstall the operating system.

Basically what i would like to do is a full backup and system state of the os and installed applications and reinstall windows 2003 r2 and restore the backed up applications and system state to have the server backup and running again without having to reinstall all applications again.

Has anyone had good luck with this. I dont think a asr backup will work also as i will be changing the drives to a tad smaller ones, so im hoping that i can still run with the rest.

Any ideas as i have not done this before and hope to have it right the first time

Thanks

Flames

dynamik

ASR requires the same or larger. I've had it refuse to work for me even though Windows listed the drives as identical size in MB. It kept telling me the new drive was too small. It must have been smaller by just a few KB.

What backup software do you have? ASR is going to be your only option with ntbackup.

May I ask why you'd prefer to go through all of this instead of next-day in drives from newegg.com or pick them up locally?

Also, your replacement drives should work if they are equal or larger than than the originals. Although, it sounds like you only have smaller drives in this case.

royal

Personally, since the server is still operational, I would do the following:
1. System State Backup - ensure that it's a good backup
2. Full Backup - ensure it's a good backup
3. Order new identical drives
4. Pull out the failed disks
5. Add the new disks in
6. Go through the RAID configuration/BIOS and resync the arrays to their new respective disks.

I'd ensure that backups get done ASAP... NOW if possible to ensure you don't have any data loss.

If one of the other drives fail, you'll need the new disks, install them, get Windows back up and running, and then restore your backups. If you have a Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) solution, you should be able to just do a restore without having to install Windows and then do your Full Restore.

flames1000

Hey guys,

Thanks for the replies.

We have a couple SCSI drives that i can rebuild the OS Raid 1 array with that are a tad smaller than the 2 that were orginally in the raid 1 array. This is not a highly critical server, so im asked to use the drives that i have and recreate the mirror and reinstall windows and try to recover all the installed applications.

Im using NT Backup on this server and will be doing a full backup of the C Drive and the System state. I have the Raid 5 done as i had a extra drive and rebuilt the array there from the failed drive.

Since im installing to different drives of a smaller size, i was thinking that the asr backup was not going to be a viable option to use?

I want to install W2L3 R2 and install all patches and then restore the system state and then restore my c drive and see if that will work, but im not sure if restoring the c;\windows folder is going to mess things up?

What should be the correct order to restore all the installed applications, or should i just omit the c;\windows folder and restore everything else after the system state?

thanks

flames

dynamik

You are correct, ASR will only work with equal or larger size drives.

What's the size difference and between the old and new drives? Maybe you could do something like resize the drive with partition magic, get the partition down smaller than your new drive, and just do an ASR.

Partition Magic

I'm not sure how well PM works with RAID devices. You may need to break the RAID first.

As Royal mentioned, I'd do a full and system state backup first, just in case anything gets screwed up in the process.

flames1000

Hi dynamik,

Thanks for the reply.

The drive sizes are out by 500 megs. I figure it would be good practice to try the restore and see how it works.

I figure that the order that i should do this is:

Rebuild the Raid 1
Reinstall the OS and install all patches while its off the domain
Restore the system state
restore the whole c drive? (not sure if i should not exclude anything?)
Keep my fingers crossed

Flames