Ghosting Exchange 5.5 1

[freaktechnique]

Hi all,

Is it possible to use Symantec Ghost to ghost an entire Nt40 sp6a Exchange 5.5 sp4 server.

My situation is I cannot get a good backup and before I run eseutil and isinteg I want to have a restoreable copy.

My plan is to first restore a different server backup to a restore server and try Ghosting that and restoring from the Ghost Image before trying it on the production server. I was looking to see if anyone has done this before and could give some feedback or advice.

My two concerns are:

I expect some corruption since I have not been able to get a good backup and I am wondering what Ghost will do when it encounters these errors.

Also is it possible to corrupt the dbs by running Ghost on them. Which is why I plan to try the process on a non production server first.

Thanks.

 

[Marcs41]

Hum, that will work, but ..
1: You cannot do it while the OS and Exch is running.
2: To reatore your Ghost image on another server, you need the excact same one, NT 4 is not flexible aout that, it will NOT adapt to new hardware!

If you want to try it, get identical disks, or create identical partitions on another disk.
Ghost your NT4, take out the harddisk and put in the blank one. Restore on that one and test. If ok, swap again and do your stuff.

Marc
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[freaktechnique]

marcs41 thanks for the reply. I am a bit confused though.


When I run Ghost I will be booting from floppy so the server will definitely not be up, right?

Then after the image completes, swap the drives on the server so that all the hardware is the same and restore the image?

Is there any chance that running Ghost can corrupt the databases?

 

[N0ktar]

I used to work for a Microsoft training center and we used to Ghost many systems every day, we also Ghosted Exchange for the classes. There was nothing unusual there in the process, really. Just give it a shot on test server first, if only to make sure you have a good image to work with.

 

[N0ktar]

However, our Instructor machines did have the exact same hardware configuration.

 

[Marcs41]

freaktech, yes indeed, if you boot from a floppy you're fine, nothing is running, I forgot to add that part.

Whatever Ghost would corrupt, it won't do it on your 'real' disk. It can happen the image fails or corrupts, but that you will find out after a test.
Ghost does not touch your original disk, unless to read it of course.

Swap the disk so the real one keeps safe. Test, mess, whatever with the other one, it is just a test.
BEWARE: If you let Exchange run, and mail comes in, it WILL be lost unless the client picks it up and stores it localy, because it will not be on the original.

As I said NOktar, in NT4 there is little chanche you get it running on different hardware, NT will not adapt as there is no decent PnP.

 

[freaktechnique]

Thanks for the info Noktar and marcs

I am going to try this on the non-prod server this weekend. I will post back with results.

 

[mike722]

If your IS is really big then you may have trouble makin a ghost image as DOS only see s 2 gig to write to. One way around it is to ghost to a CD-R drive then you can keep span the image across CD's.

Before running eseutil and isinteg , why not just stop the services copy the IS to another PC to keep as a backup? As an extra precaution you could then just ghost the system partition only.

Mike

 

[Marcs41]

Of course you would need something higher then the good old DOS 6.22. A Win98 disk will do.

 

[mike722]

It doens't make any differnece what version of the DOS boot disk you use, still only see 2 gig of the destination drive that you write the image to.

Mike

 

[Marcs41]

Sorry, but I use a 98 disk, and I can easily ghost an 8 Gig drive with it, provided you use the latest Ghost version.

 

[mike722]

oh ok, fair enough. Then I must be wrong,

Mike