Right, so we got a server in to do an Exchange moveover. It was late, but we wanted a backup. So, we have the server, a copy of Ghost 2003 and we wanted a backup. We installed Ghost 2003 without errors and incompatability warnings so we proceded to running the Ghost Backup Wizard. Set the software to use USB2.0 to pick my external drive, but we didn’t have enough space, so we told ghost to span over to another USB2.0 drive we had. All looked, “We’ve done this many times before, we don’t need the emergency disc! Let’s go!” Task restarts the server, “Starting PC-DOS…”, good so far. Picks up USB drive. Ghost screen shows up, we’ve seen this take a couple of seconds before, so we wait. Then we wait some more. “Hang on, something isn’t right”. We hit reset and wait for the PC-DOS to start up again, which it does. This time it didn’t pick up USB drives we retried. Still no USB. “Oh well, let’s just run NTBackup.” So, we told ghost to not worry about and that we wanted to return to Windows. “Where’s our Windows installation?” Um… Something’s wrong here… Reboot… Still got PC-Dos, so we tried returning to Windows again. At this point our hearts sank out the bottom of our boots. After another reboot we got our favourite error: NTLDR is missing, Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart. At this point, we started to really worry. Google!!! Oh, OK. It’s a common problem, we’ve seen it before. Recovery console off CD. Installation/Data still there. Thank goodness. fixboot: Successful. We restart, no results. fixmbr: Successful. We restart, no results. Google! Google! At this point, we also checked to see what Symantec had to say about this: Norton Ghost doesn’t support RAID drives. This was strange, because I have done this before, single drive over to a RAID array. This time not so lucky. It was now about 23:00 SAST. I phoned Microsoft SA and a nice lady told me that MS support’s office hours are 9-5 or something. That’s OK, grab my cell phone and call Redmond. I tell them my whole story, after telling them I was calling from South Africa within in the first 10 seconds of being on the phone. After telling the story for 5 minutes, at international call rates, they tell me, “Sorry, USA supported is for USA residents only”. Being told this by a nice lady in Ireland confused me somewhat, so I said, Thank you and good night. This was also a bit off, seeing that most server maintenance happens after hours. We decided that there was nothing more to be done, so we went home, hoping to call Microsoft SA in the morning.
We get back to the office and do more research, but decide to call in the big guns. We try some stuff, check that all the data is there, do some more research. By the way, there isn’t much. Everything on the internet we tried and nothing seemed to work. Also, in this time we had tried doing a repair off the CD, but still nothing. By the way, that wasn’t such a good idea, but you will see just now why. To cut a long story short, here is how to recover from a failed Norton Ghost 2003 on a Windows 2003 server running Intel SRCS16 SATA RAID controller (RAID5):
1. Install Windows Server 2003 on an IDE drive. The motherboard did have onboard SATA but we didn’t want anything to accidentally happen to the data. You can not install WindowsXP, because the drives will not show up. We install did not install the driver for the RAID controller at this point.
2. Once Windows is installed, we installed the RAID driver, this brought up the drives straight away and we saw our data and promptly made a backup of all the partitions.
3. In disc management, we made the OS partition active, et voila! We then removed the IDE drive and set the BIOS to boot of the RAID controller. The machine booted.
The reason why you mustn’t try a repair, is because it then continued once we booted off the partition. We then had issues with activation and the server wanting to “Continue setup…”
The possiblity does exist that some of the things we tried to start with did in fact work, but the last steps is what got it working.
It is now 01:19 and we are finnally getting to what we started out to do: Move Exchange to another server.
Moral of the story: Do not use Norton Ghost to backup Windows 2003 server that is running on RAID. We will cause endless hassles.
We also removed the Norton Ghost virtual partition from the drive within the “DOS” portion of the Windows setup and then rebooted.