Re: Windows Fault tolerant boot disk. How to create ??

Hi Steve,
I'm late to this discussion, but let me try to straighten things up.

What you refer to as ERD (Emergency Rescue Disk) existed in Windows NT and
Windows 2000.
This was a floppy disk, but not a bootable one. It only contained the
information about the system disk's layout so that in case that it needed to
be replaced with a new one, a similar organization could be recreated
(partitions, volumes).

ERD without backed up data is useless, so in Win XP and Windows 2003,
Microsoft introduced ASR (Automated System Recovery). This is basicaly ERD
(floppy) with a system disk's backup. This is part of ntbackup. When you
invoke ASR from ntbackup, you create a backup of your system disk and the
wizard asks you to place a blank diskette where it writes the information
about the layout of the physical disk that you boot from. If you need to
replace the system disk, you place the blank unpartitioned, unformatted
disk. You then boot from WinXP/Win2003 and invoke ASR with F2. The
installation process asks for floppy to recreate the structure of your
system disks, then installs just enough of recovery environment to start
ntbackup in restore mode. The restore then restores the contents of your
system disk.

There is another floppy that admins use to start the system. This is the
floppy that contains ntldr, boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntbootdd.sys. This
again does not load complete OS, but assists the system to find startup
files in the event of boot environment failure, such as when you loose the
original disk of your mirror set (RAID 1). When you loose your original
disk, what happens? Suppose we have Disk 0 and Disk 1. Disk 1 is mirror of
Disk 0. When you loose Disk 0, even if the system manages to boot from Disk
1, the boot.ini file will be read. It contains path from which to resume
booting the rest of the system. Since it is mirrored, it points to the
original Disk 0 which failed. For this reason you need to have a floppy with
correct path, which is now Disk 1. Microsoft has never had a wizard that
made this boot floppy disk automaticaly, but the process how to make one was
documented in the Windows NT resource kit and later on the Technet.

In Windows XP and 2003 exists another method how to make a bootable
diskette. This is is the option when you format a diskette to make it
bootable. However this makes DOS (or rather Windows Me) bootable diskette
which cannot be used for rescue operations on NT based systems.




"steve" <> wrote in message
news:7298208d-a9a9-4059-88a4-...
>I have had some problems with mirrors and booting. Everything is up
> and running now, but of course now that the cow is out of the barn Im
> preparing for next time.
>
> Much of the MS info talks about the "Windows NT Fault tolerant boot
> disk" (ERD I believe) that you are suppose to have and create.
>
> In the old days I think you could use the command rdisk to create one
> under NT. However I can't seem to see anywhere in 2003 server how you
> can create one automatically. I see there are various copy this to
> that kind of notes on the web, but is there not some command you type
> and it creates this bootable floppy.
>
> Im asuming taht the ASR disk that you create through the backup is a
> different thing.
>
> Can anyone help me on this?
>
> regards
>
>

"steve" <> wrote in message
news:64106ea3-aae2-4281-8c24-...
> Dusko,
>
> Thanks you have added some insight here. This is basically what I was
> invesigating. I want to test out the use of the floppy and see how
> usefull it is.
>
> I asume that the links above by other helpfully users have pointed me
> to how to create such a floppy. Sad that MS does not provide utility
> to do this.

It is so painlessly simple to do it manually it would be a waste to pay
their developers what they pay them an hour to write it. You could create a
utility yourself with a batch file.

By the way - Dusko, great job. It was a very good explaination of it.

--
Phillip Windell
www.wandtv.com

The views expressed, are my own and not those of my employer, or Microsoft,
or anyone else associated with me, including my cats.
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