ADSM-L

Re: Bare metal recovery of Windows NT

1999-04-21 14:10:22
Subject: Re: Bare metal recovery of Windows NT
From: Nathan King <nathan.king AT USAA DOT COM>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 13:10:22 -0500
Yes. Bare metal restores to dissimilar hardware need to be approached very
differently.

There is an article available on IBM's website on how to do this. The
approach is significantly
different from that outlined in the redbook bare metal restore.

Nathan


        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Thomas Denier [SMTP:Thomas.Denier AT MAIL.TJU DOT EDU]
        Sent:   Wednesday, April 21, 1999 11:17 AM
        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        Subject:        Bare metal recovery of Windows NT

        My site just went through a disaster recovery test. In the process
we
        discovered a critical (and as far as I can tell, unstated)
assumption in IBM's
        documentation of bare metal recovery processes for Windows NT.

        The Windows system restored during the test did not have a separate
recovery
        partition, so we used a variant of the method IBM suggests. We
installed
        Windows NT and the ADSM client from CDROM into directories other
than the
        normal ones. We then restored all of the files originally present in
the
        partition and attempted to reboot. I think we would have had the
same problems
        if we had used a separate recovery partition.

        We were successful in recreating the original population of files.
        Unfortunately, some of the files in that population were
incompatible with the
        hardware environment at the hot site. Our production system ran on
single
        processor HP system with the C partition on an IDE drive. Our hot
site vendor
        provided us with a dual processor Compaq with only SCSI drives. Our
Windows NT
        specialists are still working on documenting the machinations they
went
        through to get the system running at the hot site. As nearly as I
can figure
        out what happened, they had to edit the boot.ini file in the root
directory to
        get it to show the right disk type, hardware address, and partition
number for
        the partition containing the Windows system, and then copy a number
of files
        from the \wintemp directory tree (the one containing the copy of
Windows
        installed from CDROM at the hot site) to the \winnt directory tree
(the one
        containing the copy of Windows restored from the ADSM server). These
included
        the hardware-oriented registry hives, hal.dll, and a file whose
contents
        depended on the number of processors.
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