Awesome. We're about half way through moving from our janky Exchange 2003 servers to our Exchange 2007 Ultra Clusters... and the Exchange 2003 server decides to take a digger last night. Not just a digger (lost three! less then a year old SCSI3 disks in a 0+1 array in a matter of 2 days), but we don't have current backups... Using Active@Undelete to try and recover some data. It's a blast and a half. At least we've got affect people backup with a dial-tone mailbox on our hot spare 2003 box.
Moral of the story: nightly incremental backups are your friend.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Active@Boot Disk on Windows Deployment Services
We use a toolset from Active@ called UNDELETE. It's a nifty little program for recovering files off of hard disks that have been wiped, have a broken partition, etc.
One of the nicest features is the ability to use the program from a Windows PE 2.0 ISO to boot a machine and recover files. While this is nice, network booting it is a a much nicer solution that doesn't require you to have a CD on you at all times. After some tinkering, I've gotten it to sucessfully PXE.
What you need: Windows Server 2003 SP2 Windows Deployment Services server and the BootDiskEnt.ISO from the Active@ Boot Disk.
Process:
One of the nicest features is the ability to use the program from a Windows PE 2.0 ISO to boot a machine and recover files. While this is nice, network booting it is a a much nicer solution that doesn't require you to have a CD on you at all times. After some tinkering, I've gotten it to sucessfully PXE.
What you need: Windows Server 2003 SP2 Windows Deployment Services server and the BootDiskEnt.ISO from the Active@ Boot Disk.
Process:
- Mount the BootDiskEnt.ISO using your favorite ISO mounting utility.
- Navigate to "X:\Sources\" (where X is the drive letter where you mounted the ISO
- Copy the Boot.WIM file over the the deployment server.
- On the deployment server, open up Windows Deployment Services MMC
- Expand the tree to : Windows Deployment Services -> Servers -> Server Name -> Boot Images.
- Right click and select "Add Boot Image".
- In the wizard, click Browse and select the Boot.WIM file. Click Next until you complete the wizard.
- It will take a few minutes to load, once it does you should see "Active@Boot Disk" listed as a boot image.
- To use it, simply boot the system from the WDS server over PXE and select "Active@ Boot Disk" from the list of available boot images. It will boot just as if you had loaded it off of CD.
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