We have a client who chose not to implement any backup system on a server for a school with roughly 150 users. Despite our best efforts, the person who signs the checks felt comfortable with thinking their data was in the cloud because they use Mac's and have Gmail. I have numerous emails communicating with one of the higher ups that they're flirting with disaster. This is an accredited school too.
So we go onsite to check their server the morning after it went offline. RAID console shows a drive with high number of media errors and a predictive failure status. Being a RAID it should still boot with one failed drive. I'm able to boot with a recovery disk and see the volumes. Windows recovery shows an error with the partition. I boot with Windows 8 PE and can see the volumes. I'm able to clone the OS drive using Ghost. The data drive will not image. NTFS errors galore. I manage to copy 98% of the data to an external drive over the course of 2 days. The ideal scenario is to recover this OS because there are numerous accounts, GPO's, etc... that we just don't want to have to rebuild from scratch not to mention the process of rejoining 80+ PC's to the domain and dealing with profiles. We attempted to repair the BCD. Tried manually repairing, tried Shadowprotect boot CD, Paragon HD Tools, nothing would fix it. In our research of options, we came across a company called U-Tools. They make a utility called U-Move which moves AD from a dead server to a new server. I decided to give this little gem a try. At $400 for a domain license I admit I was nervous. The process involves loading the OS fresh, different hostname, different static IP, load all roles the old server had, except AD and DNS. U-Move will take care of that part. We ran all updates on the OS then started the process. The wizard is easy to follow and it only took about 5 minutes to start the process. Once it started it was finished in 5 minutes prompting for a reboot. Holy cow I thought. It can't be this easy can it? Reboot and bam! AD restored. I couldn't believe what I just witnessed. Everything fully intact.
This has been a good day. We have bets on whether they will purchase a backup solution now.
So we go onsite to check their server the morning after it went offline. RAID console shows a drive with high number of media errors and a predictive failure status. Being a RAID it should still boot with one failed drive. I'm able to boot with a recovery disk and see the volumes. Windows recovery shows an error with the partition. I boot with Windows 8 PE and can see the volumes. I'm able to clone the OS drive using Ghost. The data drive will not image. NTFS errors galore. I manage to copy 98% of the data to an external drive over the course of 2 days. The ideal scenario is to recover this OS because there are numerous accounts, GPO's, etc... that we just don't want to have to rebuild from scratch not to mention the process of rejoining 80+ PC's to the domain and dealing with profiles. We attempted to repair the BCD. Tried manually repairing, tried Shadowprotect boot CD, Paragon HD Tools, nothing would fix it. In our research of options, we came across a company called U-Tools. They make a utility called U-Move which moves AD from a dead server to a new server. I decided to give this little gem a try. At $400 for a domain license I admit I was nervous. The process involves loading the OS fresh, different hostname, different static IP, load all roles the old server had, except AD and DNS. U-Move will take care of that part. We ran all updates on the OS then started the process. The wizard is easy to follow and it only took about 5 minutes to start the process. Once it started it was finished in 5 minutes prompting for a reboot. Holy cow I thought. It can't be this easy can it? Reboot and bam! AD restored. I couldn't believe what I just witnessed. Everything fully intact.
This has been a good day. We have bets on whether they will purchase a backup solution now.
