Hi Group!
I have a handful of servers that I’d like to establish what I call disaster recovery disks for. In the past with NT 4.0 server, I could clone (ghost) the disk, then place the D/R drive off-site. Should the need ever arise, I could place that D/R drive in a new computer, apply the latest tape backup – (we rotate offsite) then be up and running with a minimal amount of fuss and downtime.
I’m trying to accomplish the same thing now with Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server. For whatever reason, the knuckleheads that configured these machines initially used the software-raid for disk mirroring. I say knuckleheads, as there are a case of Promise cards that do hardware-raid that they should have used. I think the fact that these are now dynamic volumes is what is screwing me up.
With the advent of the dynamic disk – I cann’t get ghost to clone the drive properly. I’ve tried every way I can think of to get a mirror of my disk. I finally ended up swapping out the existing mirrored drive and replacing it with another drive – only to find out that it was too large (160 GB) for the onboard IDE controller. I installed a promise card that could read the drive, then used the disk admin to mirror the data to this drive. (software RAID again – so the new drive is now dynamic too)
The next step was to get this drive to boot in another computer. Reading the docs, we made our “fault-tolerant” boot floppy. We can’t get this drive to be recognized – even tried re-installing the OS and recovering.
The question is: How do you guys go about creating your disaster recovery drives? Surely you all don’t abide by Microsoft’s instruction to re-install and reconfigure the OS?
I would like to end up with a solution that does not require me to reconfigure anything – I would like a clone of the hard drive as it is in its present state. I’ll worry about bringing it up to date by restoring from tape.
Thanks in advance!
-Mike