Restoring SBS 2003
Alex mailed me with a problem he had backing up SBS 2003. Whenever he did a trial restore he got NTOSKRNL.EXE errors. He was concerned that when he had to do things for real, then the restore would go badly wrong. NTOSKRNL.exe errors usually point to the fact that NTLDR can’t find the partition to bootstrap the OS onto. So check the ARC path in boot.ini is correct for the server you are restoring back to, and check that win2003 will be loading from the same partition – either 0 or 1 or whatever. Read this article for info on the boot process…
He found that the DELL server he was taking the backup from, had a hidden primary partition of 102Mb for the DELL utils that he wasn't taking account of when doing the backup. By inserting an extra 102Mb partition before his main C: 12 Gb partition, it worked. He doesn''t think however that 12Gb is big enough any more for the C drive. It does seem that this partition needs to be fairly hefty given the huge amount of applications installed in C:\Program Files.
Mine is 40Gb as I stuff everything on there - with my Virtual machines on the other drive as a backup to my external disk. So what would you recommend for the C:\ partition. In the office we had wildly differing ideas. So how big is yours...?
