Disaster Recovery: Rebuliding the system state.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Donald Newcomb
  • Start date Start date
D

Donald Newcomb

Following the crash of my hard drive, I've been learning a lot that I didn't
fully understand about Win2000 disaster recovery. One of these things is the
importance to back up the system state when you run NTBackup. The good news
is that I backed up all my files, so there was only slight loss of data. The
bad news is that I'm having to tediously rebuild the system state. This
includes reapplying all the updates, reloading all software (the software is
there, the system just does not know it) and rebuild the user information.

The last bit is one thing I could use some help with. Say, that asside from
the Admin, I had one user, "Don". He had all his stuff under "C:\Doucments
and Setting\Don" When I reload from backup, this directory is reloaded. Then
I recreate the user Don. Only this time, the system does not use the
existing "C:\Documents and Settings\Don" directory. Rather, it creates
"C:\Documents and Settings\Don.HOST_NAME". I need a way to fix this so that
I can recover my documents and settings.

After this gets solved, I will probably need to reattach Don's Outlook
Express files to his current identity, or somethng like that, so that he has
access to his e-mail. I have a clue how to do this from dealing with
previous Outlook Express problems, but will have to read up on it.
 
Edit
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirecto
ry and existed S-1-5-21... ProfileImagePath data. Delete excessive
directories.
 
Jetro said:
Edit
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirecto
ry and existed S-1-5-21... ProfileImagePath data. Delete excessive
directories.
Click to expand...

Thanks! That looks very reasonable. Can you explain why before the crash I
had a user named "Don" with a user directory named "Don" and now when I
create "Don", it comes out as "Don.HOSTNAME"?
 
Jetro said:
Edit
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirecto
ry and existed S-1-5-21... ProfileImagePath data. Delete excessive
directories.
Click to expand...

Thanks again. For the reference of future Google searchers, this helped me
find KB 314045 "How To: Restore a User Profile in Windows 2000"

What I have done is to:
1. Rename Don's old profile directory to XXXDon
2. Create a user named "Don"
3. Log on as Don then log off. This creates the Profile entry in the
Registry.
4. Change the permissions on the XXXDon directory to replace the old Don SID
to the new SID.
5. Edit the registry to change ProfileImagePath from Don to XXXDon.
6. Log back on as Don. The old settings and MyDocuments are now resotred.
7. Later I went back and changed the directory name and ProfileImagePath to
restore the name Don to each.

This seems to have restored most of my settings. Time will tell.
Now I just have relink my Outlook Express files.
Once I finish this I'll do a backup and this time I'll remember back up the
system state.
 
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