Big picture of an effective partition recovery

Talking of comprehensive partition recovery, many of us make a lot of assumptions. Usually, we backup the data over the server regularly and send tapes off-site. So whenever something wrong happens to the server, we just plan on pulling out the tapes and restoring it.

Know where OS is situated- It is quite important to know where OS is situation as the original server has the OS installed on a partition indifferent from drive 0 partition 1. Hence, when you perform restore operation to recover the registry, it recovers current system partition instead of original system partition. This consequent mismatch of registry and system files results in Blue Screen of Death.

Also, it is important to be familiar with the position of OS for Boot.ini. After the complete system or partition recovery, Boot.ini file is established in its indigenous state. Most of the partitions on a system don’t matter to OS, but the important thing is that the system and boot partitions are identical for original server.

Server will not boot until it has the right drivers- The first thing you see after you restore a backup to a server and reboot is a blue screen prompting about the SCSI drivers or message indicating that you don’t have any disk drives. You got to restore the system but the new hardware doesn’t boot with the old drivers until and unless the hardware stuff is identical. According to Microsoft you can restore system by replacing the old driver with the new one by renaming files. However, the problem with this process is that not all controllers share the same registry information unless you are working with the same hardware brand.

In order to resolve this problem, try booting the system to hardware you know won’t work, boot to the NT setup. When prompted, define the correct driver for your SCSI controller and conduct an Upgrade installation. The update will execute NTDETECT and enable the appropriate drivers to load, including video and NIC drivers (that might be different). Once the process is completed, you will be able to boot the restored system.

Get familiar with your service packs- Reload your service pack and hot fixes as we updated the OS and replaced good files with files from the original CD. In order to clear anomalies if any, it becomes imperative to reload your service packs and hot fixes.

Don’t wait or it will be too late to react to partition recovery and if you kept the backups, you must be thankful as to how reliable your backups proved to be. Always test run your backups to keep a check on your backups and know how good they can be for future use.