>>
>>I search for a simple way to recovery a Windows NT Server from
>> disaster
>> to the OS/2 bootable diskettes. Who have the experience to help me.
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>> Doris

The following is a recommended diaster recovery procedure for NT with
ADSM.

Pete Tanenhaus, ADSM Client Development
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Windows NT disaster recovery planning with ADSM
Windows NT disaster recovery planning with ADSM
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Currently it is not possible to start NT from a diskette, so recovering
a damaged/destroyed production NT partition usually requires some
sort of reinstallation of NT either from scratch or via the
emergency repair diskette created during installation.

One possible alternative to consider is installing a minimal version
of NT on a different partition or better yet on an external device.

The ideal solution would be to be able to store this minimal version
of NT on a removable device such as an Iomega ZIP or JAZ cartridge.

If it is possible for NT to boot from one of these removable SCSI
devices, it would be the best possible alternative.

At the very least the alternate partition should exist on different
physical hard drive than the production partition being protected.

The advantage of maintaining an alternate partition is that system
recovery will not require reinstallation of NT.

The additional advantage of having the alternate partition on
an external/removable device (or at the very least a separate physical
drive) is that the production system will be protected from a hardware
failure to the production disk drive.

Here is list of steps for designing a disaster recovery procedure
utilizing an alternate partition with ADSM:


  1. Install a minimal NT configuration onto an alternate partition.

     This configuration should include TCP/IP and the ADSM 32-Bit
     Windows client, and should occupy less than 100MB of disk space.

     Ideally this partition should be on a different physical drive
     than the production partition (or better yet, have it on an
     external drive) to protect against a hardware failure on the drive
     containing the production NT partition.

     It may be desirable to edit boot.ini and change the description
     of this partition to something like "Emergency NT 3.51 Partition".


  2.  Create a diskette bootable version of the NT boot manager.

      This is done in case the NT system files residing on the C:
      drive are damaged causing the machine not to boot.

      This can be done by formatting a diskette and copying the
      following files from C: drive of the machine:

              bootsect.dos **
              boot.ini
              ntdetect.com
              ntldr

              ** - must be the first file copied

      This diskette will be used if the C: drive is damaged and the
      machine won't boot.


  3.  Use ADSM to perform regular incremental backups. By default the
      ADSM 32-Bit Windows client will backup the entire registry when
      an incremental backup is performed on the system partition.



To recover the production partition, perform the following steps after
the hardware is made operational:

  1. If the system files on the C: drive were destroyed/corrupted
     and the machine won't boot, boot the the diskette based
     boot manager

  2. Start the emergency partition.

  3. If the system files on the C: drive were damaged, the C: drive
     must be reformatted.

     After it has been formatted, copy the system files from the boot
     manager diskette to the C: drive. Again, bootsect.dos must be the
     first file copied.

  4. Use ADSM to restore all damaged/destroyed partitions. The same
     client options file used for the production backups should be
     used.

  5. Restore the production partition registry as follows:

       dsmc res x:/adsm.sys/registry/NTMACH/machine/*.*
                x:/winnt/system32/config/

       dsmc res x:/adsm.sys/registry/NTMACH/users/default
                x:/winnt/system32/config/

       dsmc res x:/adsm.sys/registry/NTMACH/users/Admin
                x:/winnt/system32/config/

     where x: is the drive letter of the production partition,
     NTMACH is the name of the NT machine, and Admin is the name
     of the account performing the production backups.


  6. Reboot the machine. The production partition should start
     and be in the same state it was after the last ADSM backup.

     If the machine is a domain controller it should be resync'ed
     with the the primary domain controller.


This scenario has been tested and should work provided all steps are
correctly followed.

The key is being able to rely on hardware containing the alternate
partition, which is why an external scsi device is probably the safest
and most reliable solution.

Consequently, if the NT server/workstation is critical enough, it is
definitely worth considering investing in such a device for solely for
disaster recovery purposes.


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