Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Fri Aug 4 14:31:09 CDT 2006
Hi John First, get the BartPE to boot into Windows from a cd: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder a fabulous piece of free software. Then - I've written it many times, I know - if you run a serious business, and you do, run serious hardware with decent support like IBM or HP. I don't say that home built machines do not work, only that the scenario you describe is what we often see with "strange" hardware but nearly never with branded equipment. /gustav >>> jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com 04-08-2006 21:03:55 >>> My "server" system just blue screened, and when I tried to reboot it said I needed to repair the windows install (could not find file X in c:\windows\...). Of course I don't have a system disk set (the four floppies). I could swear that I have in the past booted off the Windows CD and it offered to repair the install. This time it did not and launched right in to reinstalling windows. Boy does THAT suck!!! So it certainly appears that whatever happened trashed the disk. Boy does THAT suck. I have a nice raid mirror (which appears to still be valid!) which did not help at all. Given all the above I am really hesitant to rebuild this thing. Every time this happens I always swear that THIS time I am going to figure out how to gracefully recover, but once again I am rebuilding a computer. Speaking of which, I now have a pair of SQL Server files which (of course) contain a lot of work. They reside out on separate data disks and are probably just fine. Is it possible to get them "mounted" again when I get a new system up running SQL Server? They are not backup disks, just the normal files that SQL Server creates in the process of doing business. So how do you ensure that you can always recover from this kind of stuff? A mirror was no help at all. And why did Windows not recognize that there was a windows install on that partition and offer to repair it? I am launching into a project that is so big that if it crashes like this again I will be really screwed. There will be a terabyte SQL Server database. How do you back THAT up? I am looking at going out and buying a media fire safe and extra hard disks (they come in 750g sizes now) but even so, backing it up is going to be a week long project. Any words of wisdom on any of this? John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com