Cloning for contingency

[adrianday]

Hello hope you can help with a problem i have got. In the past with various versions of citrix, whenever we apply a hotfix or make a change to our servers, we have taken a clone image so that if we have a problem we can just change hard disk and be back up and running.

I am just installing presentation server 4.5 and before applying our applications and activating licenses, wish to do a clone. However when i try to boot up with the cloned drive, windows 2003 starts, it then goes to a grey screen and then errors complaining " The login user inteface DLL M:\windows\system32\ctxgina.dll failed to load"

I am puzzled because i thought cloning software just copied bits from one drive to another. I am obviously wrong

cheers Adrian

 

[enigma99]

adrianday,
You should be able to get around this issue by simply copying over the ctxgina.dll from another Citrix server.

You can do this by either booting up with WinPE or boot up in safe mode.
You might also be able to hit the server from the network and just copy the file over and replace it.


Hope that helps.

 

[adrianday]

Thanks for your reply enigma, i will give that a try. I have read around quite a bit now and it would seem that the problem is 'caused' by having the drives remapped. i.e C$ becomes M$. so i installed a test server left with no remapping and it clones just fine.
I have looked at a number of sites that sell or give away cloning software and none of them mention this at all. I am a bit surprised at this as its quite common to have clones of citrix servers for contingency, rather than backups.

It may be a factor that the servers used are dell 2950 with SAS HDD's . if i find anything out i will post back to this thread.
cheers Adrian

 

[dvdbaan]

You're correct, it is related to the remapping of the drives. This occures when the volume sid or partitions change.
When doing a diskclone this won't happen but restoring images will.

Solution:
Use WinPE, BartPE or quivalent to edit the registry of the citrix machine offline. Start Regedit and open the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM hive and select Load Hive[\b]. Browse on the citrix disk to c:\windows\system32\config and open the System file and enter a new temporary "HiveName". Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\"HiveName"\MountedDevices and change the \DosDevices\C: \DosDevices\D: etc to the original driveletters.

 

[adrianday]

Thanks for the info dvdbaan . I will try this out next time i have a non production machine

 

[myshtigo]

This worked perfectly for me. We rebuilt a new 4.5 environment and ghosted straight from one dell pe 1950 to another without sysprep.

We use M: N: O: and the location you mentioned (mounteddevices) showed:

C:
D:
E:
M:
N:
O:

We deleted the M: N: O: and renamed the
C: -> M:
D: -> N:
E: -> O:

Only other thing we did to get this working was deleting the files in localdb dir under program files\citrix\citrixresources\localdb. Can't say if this made any difference or not, however.

Thanks again.

 

[myshtigo]

Forgot we also ran newsid from sysinternals to redo sid and rename server!