I survived a hard drive crash with no data loss and no time spent for installs! Kudos to the Microsoft Server Backup / PC System Repair team!
Two days ago the SCSI hard drive in my Win 2008 home server (Domain Controller, DNS, web, etc) died on me . It was an 80GB Cheetah from another era (or should I say Dinosaur), and it probably it was its time� I had back-ups of important personal user files from other computers (so I was not yet puling my hair), but even those could not be accessed. See, the Linux NAS used for storage refused to give access to the shares without a domain controller to authenticate the logon requests�
I was already seeing myself spending a week reinstalling and reconfiguring the server, and my heart was full of joy at this idea. Not! Fortunately, it intrigued me why I kept installed on the machine another 300GB old drive, and when I checked I discovered it contained a full system backup VHD image from the same day! I had completely forgot about it. I didn�t even remember when I had the moment of lucidity to set up automatic daily backups, but boy, am I ever glad I did!
I bought another hard drive, I used a Windows Vista (!) installation disk as I couldn�t find the one from Win2008 (it worked fine, btw), and 30 minutes later my server was up and running, with no data loss. SCSCI �> SATA, 80GB �> 1TB unformatted, unmatched restore tools, all these were no problems for System Repair. Yay system restore!
Now I can focus on the second crashed machine, where the power supply crashed and burned (literally) and unfortunately it took with it at least the motherboard� Or maybe it was the other way around, who knows. But fixing it will be the fun for another night.
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