I've never been able to get the bare-metal restore to work doing a restore
starting from a Live CD. I last tried it over a year ago and people
responded a while later saying they got it to work that way and they would
update a web page with said info but it appears never to have happened.
That would be far simpler than messing with the windows ASR disks. I was
able to get the files restored but couldn't make the system fully windows
bootable. If anybody has done some recent bare-metal restoring for
windows, please update the wiki page or put up another page somewhere else
and link to it.
Also, there have been conflicting messages posted on here about whether
bacula restores windows junction points in the current version or if it
still just complains about not wanting to back them up (it still complains
but I don't know for sure if that means it doesn't want to traverse through
them or if it's actually backing up the junction point as a special file
system item at all).
Off the topic of bacula for a second, what did you mean by "PS MS SQL
Server v5 is involved here." ? Did you mean MS SQL 2005 or MySql 5?
MySQL does not support VSS. MS SQL does (but only in the 2005 and later
version I presume) but if your db is doing a lot of writes I wouldn't rely
on it--for trying to do a fully 100% safe restore of a database engine (or
anything else if you're not wanting writes made after you back it up to be
lost completely) you really need to shut the db engine down, take the
backup, then work on the restore. Otherwise you risk having people think
stuff got updated when those updates are about to get lost. For regular
backups, it's not necessary to shut the db down but if you know you're
going to wipe the drive after the backup you really want to eliminate all
writes that can't be lost before taking the final backup.
Bob
> From: Bruno Friedmann <br...@ioda-net.ch>
> Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] bare metal windows server 2003 restore
> To: bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net
> Message-ID: <4c125566.4030...@ioda-net.ch>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hi Gavin
>
> How would you restore a VSS snapshot without having VSS ( in you linux live
> cd ) ?
> That's the real question.
>
> So yes yours steps are naive (in my opinion). What is described in the wiki
> are the rights step.
>
> Otherwise, if you don't change your hardware, and just want to arrange some
> partionning, with the help of having store place
> somewhere ( network or usb ) you could do it directly offline with a live cd
> ( systemrescuecd ) and ntfsclone
> save all your data, adjust partitionning , save the mbr ( but you don't need
> to change it )
> and restore with ntfsclone.
>
> You're done ... and yes no need of bacula ( but I would certainly have a full
> backup of the system )
> don't forget to generate the system state snapshot like mentionned in wiki if
> you are not doing it already ...
>
> Do a chkdsk /F and a reboot before cloning just to be sure ntfs are in good
> shape.
>
>
> On 06/11/2010 03:57 PM, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > we have a windows server 2003 server here and realised that its disk setup
>> > is in such a bad way that we want to reinstall it. Never having done one,
>> > we thought it would be nice to try a bare metal restore of the machine from
>> > the backups (to spare disks). Both c:\ and d:\ drives are entirely backed
>> > up by Bacula using VSS.
>> >
>> > I was expecting to:
>> >
>> > 1. Put a linux live cd in the server and boot it.
>> > 2. Partition the disk(s) appropriately. Format them appropriately (NTFS).
>> > 3. Start a bacula-fd in linux.
>> > 4. Tell the bacula-dir to restore that server entirely through the running
>> > bacula-fd (probably need to do c:\ and d:\ separately).
>> > 5. Restore the MBR somehow (windows recovery cd maybe?)
>> > 6. Cross my fingers and reboot.
>> >
>> > However, when I looked at the wiki, I found this article which seems a
>> > little more complex.
>> >
>> > http://wiki.bacula.org/doku.php?id=windows_bare_metal_recovery:ntbackup
>> >
>> > Are my steps [1-5] extremely naive? Would that not work? Do I have to go
>> > the way the wiki page says? I thought I recalled someone suggesting that
>> > [1-6] should work.
>> >
>> > Many thanks in advance for any info,
>> >
>> > Gavin
>> >
>> > PS MS SQL Server v5 is involved here. Should having VSS mean that's okay
>> > to just restore directly? We do have database backups if need be, but it
>> > would be nice if that wasn't needed.
>> >
>> >
>
> -- Bruno Friedmann
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