NT gets a BSOD when you sneeze at the drivers/config. We have to do some upgrades on some NT boxes, but, first, we need to make sure we can recover from a system that can’t boot. This site started out with NT (cough… ntadmintools.com), but it has been a long time. Many Linux and Windows […]
Creating an NT boot disk
Using the Windows 2000 Recovery Console to Fix NT
In this article, we created a boot disk that could recover from a rename of ntldr. Well, what if you needed access to other files on the NTFS file system to recover. It would be nice if you could use something like the Windows 2000 Recovery Console to fix the filesystem. Well, guess what? You […]
Using Last Known Good Configuration To Restore an NT System
In this article we used the Windows 2000 recovery console to fix the filesystem on an NT server. Let’s use the recovery console to make a BSOD. We’ll just disable a required boot service: Let’s reboot: Nice!! That is what we wanted. Now, we could boot again and fix with the recovery console: That works […]
Creating an NT Emergency Repair Disk
Rdisk is used to recover your system from boot problems, registry problems, or OS corruption. Run rdisk by start->run->rdisk. You can specify /s if you wish to restore your security permissions. Rdisk is a little misleading. You might assume that simply pushing the Create Repair Disk button would work, but it doesn’t. Make sure you […]
Recovering an NT System With an Emergency Repair Disk
To use the Emergency Repair Disk we created in this article, you need to boot with the three NT setup disks that can be created by running winnt32: If you don’t have an NT box, you can use the NT distribution cd from MS-DOS or a Windows 95/98 command prompt and run winnt /ox. Boot […]
Using Tar to Upgrade Your Hard Drive
This is a story about a whale. No!! This is a story about making my computer happy. A few days ago, I started having weird problems on my main workstation, srv-1. My system would lock up completely. Only by pushing the reset button could I wake her from her slumber. I reseated all of the […]
The Archive Bit And Incremental Backups on Windows Filesystems
The archive bit is used to determine what files have been backed up up previously on a Windows filesystem. The bit is set if a file is modified. A backup program can then clear the bit when it does a full backup. This allows the backup program to do an incremental or differential backup that […]
Creating a Recovery Partition
If you have the ability to stick a second drive in your workstation or server, it can make a great recovery tool. True, there are a lot of CD recovery distributions out there, but the approach we use here will actually fit on a 100 Meg Zip disk. Further, it is portable to virtually any […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part1
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 This series of articles will show how to set up software RAID on a Windows Server 2003 system. Before you do anything with your disks, make sure you have a good backup. Please read our terms of use. We […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part2
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 We are warned that filesystems on the disks to be converted need to be dismounted: The system will need to reboot: Confirm reboot: At this point, add a drive. After the system reboot, go back in to computer management/disk […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part3
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 At the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard dialog, check the disk you want to convert, and click next: Click finish to complete the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard: There is now one healthy dynamic disk, and one unallocated disk, […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part4
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 An error may pop up that says “Logical Disk Manager could not update the boot file for any boot partitions on the target disk. Verify your arcpath listings in file boot.ini or through the bootcfg.exe utility.” Well, we are […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part5
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 Select the Disk to remove: Confirm: We now have a healthy Disk 0: Remove the missing drive: All is as it should be:
Open Source Utility to Recover Lost Partitions and Fix Boot Problems
Famiarize yourself with TestDisk. It will run on many platforms, and supports many different kinds of partitions. We were able to compile the source on two different machines (GNU/Linux and Mac OS X Tiger). One problem with compiling on Mac OS X is that the ext2 libraries are not available. This was, of course, not […]
Restoring Individual Files and Directories with Tar
One of our systems has a DLT drive we use for backup. It isn’t in a library, and we just use regular tar to back up our main share. Here are some pointers on restoring from tape with tar. First off, you need to specify the exact path from the perspective of the tar archive. […]
Quick And Dirty Directory Replication Verification
The combination of find and wc is perfect for doing a quick verification of the integrity of the transfer. It doesn’t verify the content of the files; however, it is quick. Run this command in the root of the source and destination directories: find . | wc 9052 9052 256270 The first column of the […]
Rsync Over a Flakey Connection
By default, rsync will start the sync of a particular file over again if the connection is lost. Use the –inplace option if the sync is getting hung up on a large file: rsync -e ‘ssh -p sshport’ -av –inplace /source/ root@example.com:/dest/ Since the problem file is compressed, it does no good to use -avz, […]
Backing Up Windows XP With FreeNAS
We wrote about FreeNAS in this series of articles. A lot has happened with FreeNAS since then. The most important addition is user security for CIFS. We brought up an old PII 333 box to test performance, and it passed with flying colors doing a rather large backup over the network. Here is a screenshot […]
Finding Files Over a Certain Size
Try this: find . -type f -size +90M -exec ls -l -h {} \;
Backoffice 4.5 Patches/Upgrades
We put together a list of files needed to update Backoffice 4.5. This includes NT 4.0, Exchange 5.5, SQL Server 7.0, SMS 2.0, Site Server 3.0, SNA server 4.0, and Proxy Server 2.0. This is what is available from Microsoft as of July 5th, 2001. Get the files while you can. Note that these files […]