AD Disaster Recovery and Windows Backup

  • Thread starter Thread starter rick.friesen
  • Start date Start date
R

rick.friesen

We are testing our AD disaster recovery, and we found
numerous helpful Q articles, the primary being Q263532.
Our domain is Windows 2000 native mode. We are restoring
to different hardware because are assuming that if we
lose the data center we would not be able to get
indentical HW.

Q263532 suggests running a backup of C: and a System
State, then restoring both with Windows Backup set to
overwrite all files. This, to our surprise, worked
fine. We were surprised because the 2 servers have
different array controllers using very different drivers.

Our primary backup software, however, is Veritas
NetBackup. The exact same process fails using NetBackup -
- the restored server freezes up before it gets to the
GUI part of startup -- thus also before it gets to the
Safe Mode screen, so there is nothing we can do. We
determined, using the /SOS startup parameter, that the
freeze occurs on a driver for the array controller from
the source server.

A system upgrade/repair (as suggested in Q263532) results
in an Inaccessible_Boot_Device stop screen.

This leads to 2 questions:

1) What is Windows Backup doing (or not doing) that
allows it to work when restoring to a machine with a
different array controller?

2) Why does the In-place Upgrade Repair _not_ install the
array controller driver we added by pressing F6 as Setup
was starting? (If it did, we wouldn't get the
Inaccessible_Boot_Device stop, but we can't run setup
without installing the correct driver.)

Thanks,

RF
 
[email protected] said:
We are testing our AD disaster recovery, and we found
numerous helpful Q articles, the primary being Q263532.
Our domain is Windows 2000 native mode. We are restoring
to different hardware because are assuming that if we
lose the data center we would not be able to get
indentical HW.
Click to expand...

I can't really answer your questions, but I have had similar problems doing
disaster recovery. Trying to do a bare metal restore is a flaming pile of
crap, unfortunately. I have had some success, however, doing only an AD
restore and not a restore of the C drive. This requires the install of the
OS on the domain controllers to remain pretty clean, if you want the restore
to work on dissimilar hardware.

I think this is part of the reason that Microsoft is redesigning the file
system for upcoming versions of the operating system; also why they are
going to the WinPE installation environment, so that restores are made
easier (among other reasons for redesigning these things).

regards,
Jim
 
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