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FEEDBACK
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Emergency Repair DiskThe emergency repair disk provides methods for both fixing problems with the Windows NT system partition and restoring the Windows NT configuration. The emergency repair disk cannot be used to directly start the system—in other words, it is not bootable—but it can be used in conjunction with the Windows NT setup disks. The biggest problem with the emergency repair disk is that one emergency repair disk is required per computer, so 300 computers require 300 emergency repair disks. For this reason, corporate users often do not use emergency repair disks for Windows NT workstations. If they experience a serious problem with a workstation, they will wipe the current installation of Windows NT and install a new copy. (This, of course, means that local data storage is forbidden.) A description of the files copied to the emergency repair disk is given in Table 9.2.
Failed Mirror Set MembersWindows NT Server can be configured to use disk mirroring to provide disk fault tolerance. (Details on disk mirroring and other disk fault-tolerant techniques can be found in Chapter 4.) The steps required to replace a failed mirror member are relatively straightforward:
When a system disk (the boot drive from which Windows NT starts) is part of a mirror set, and the shadow, or secondary, member of the shadow set fails, the procedure to resolve the failure is the same as that we have just seen. However, if the primary boot disk—the one the computer physically accesses when starting from the hard drive, known as C:—fails, the system will, of course, continue running if the failure occurs while Windows NT is in use. The actual replacement and mirroring of the replacement drive does present some difficulties, however. In the Windows NT Server Resource Kit, Microsoft provides two ways to recover the failed primary disk. The first method includes the following steps:
The second method is to:
Both methods have limitations and are not straightforward. A third method for recovering the primary disk is given in the practical guide of the chapter. Try testing all three methods to see which one best suits your hardware configuration. NT BackupBoth Windows NT Workstation and Server are provided with a file backup utility, as shown in Figure 9.2. This utility is located in the Administrative Tools program group and can be used to back up both files and folders (this is not a disk-backup product). The Backup utility can be used with any of the supported Windows NT file systems.
The Backup utility can perform various types of backups, including incremental backups. However, because no scheduling capabilities exist within the Backup utility, backups must either be performed manually or scheduled using the AT command line utility. (Details of this utility can be found in Chapter 11.) Both options are less than ideal, leading to a range of third-party backup solutions being developed for Windows NT that provide not only backup scheduling, but many other features as well. Service Update PacksService update packs are issued by Microsoft to resolve problems and provide enhancements to Windows NT. These packs are cumulative—you only have to install the latest service pack to gain all the fixes and functions of all the service packs for the particular version of the operating system. This means that the service packs are quite large. For example, Service Pack 4 for Windows NT 3.51 reached 10 MB. Service packs are language-specific, so you need to obtain the correct language version for the operating system you are using. The US service pack, however, is used for most English-speaking countries, such as the United Kingdom. Projects:
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