Wrapping up my week's discussion on Business Continuity, I've had lots of interest in myopinion stated earlier this week that it is
, and thatthis simplifies the recovery process, and that the Windows operating system can fit in a partition as small asthe
we just announced for BladeCenter. It worked for me, and I will use this post to show you how to get it done.
For this project, I have a DVD/CD burner in my Ultra-Bay, a stack of black CDs and DVDs, and a USB-attached 320GB external disk drive.
- Step 0 - Backup your system
I find it amusing that this is ALWAYS the first step, but nobody provides any instruction.I will assume we start with a single C: drive with an operational Windows operating system, intermixed programs and data. If you have a Thinkpad, you should have "IBM Rescue and Recovery" program already installed, but is probably down-level. Mine was version 2.0 -- Yikes! Download IBM Rescue and Recovery Version 4.0 for Windows XP and Windows 2000,and reboot to make it fully installed.
Make TWO backups. First, make a bootable rescue CD and backup to several DVDs. Second, backup to a large external 320GB USB-attached disk drive. IBM Rescue and Recovery does compression, so a 60GB drive that is mostly full might take about 8-10 DVDs, have plenty on hand. If you have to recover, boot from CD, and restore from the USB-attached drive. If that doesn't work, you have the DVDs just in case.
If you are suitably happy with your backups, you are ready for step 1. For added protection, you can use a Linux LiveCD to backup your entire drive. I suggestSysRescCD, which is designed to be a rescue CD and can do backups and restores.
First, figure out if your drive is "hda" or sda. The "dmesg" command below shows that mine is "sda", with output like this:
tpearson@tpearson:~$ dmesg | grep [hs]d[ 7.968000] SCSI device sda: 117210240 512-byte hdwr sectors (60012 MB)[ 7.968000] sda: Write Protect is off
[ 7.968000] sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00[ 7.968000] SCSI device sda: write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled
I like to backup the master boot record to one file, and then the rest of the C: drive to a series of 690MB compressed chunks. These can be directed to the USB-attached drive, and then later burned onto CDrom, or pack 6 files per DVD.Most USB-attached drives are formatted to FAT32 file system, which doesn't support any chunks greater than 2GB, so splitting these up into 690MB is well below that limit.dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/USBdrive/master.MBR bs=512 count=1dd if=/dev/sda1 conv=sync,noerror | gzip -c | split -b 690m - /media/USBdrive/master.gz.
To recover your system, just reverse the process:cat /media/USBdrive/master.gz.* | gzip -dc | dd of=/dev/sda1dd if=/media/USBdrive/master.MBR of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
You can learn more about these commands here and here.- Step 1 - Defrag your C: drive
From Windows, right-click on your Recycle Bin and select "Empty Recycle Bin".
Click Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter. Select C: drive and push the Analyze button. You will see a bunch of red, blue and white vertical bars. If there are any greenbars, we need to fix that. The following worked for me:
- Right-click "My Computer" and select Properties. Select Advanced, then press "Settings" buttonunder Performance. Select Advanced tab and press the "Change" button under Virtual Memory.Select "No Paging File" and press the "Set" button. Virtual memory lets you have many programs open, moving memory back and forth between your RAM and hard disk.
- Click Start->Control Panel->Performance and Maintenance->Power Options. On the Hibernate tab,make sure the "Enable Hibernation" box is un-checked. I don't use Hibernate, as it seems likeit takes just as long to come back from Hibernation as it does to just boot Windows normally.
- Reboot your system to Windows.
If all went well, Windows will have deleted both pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys, the twomost common unmovable files, and free up 2GB of space. You can run just fine without either of these features, but if you want them back, we will put them back on Step 6 below.
Go back to Disk Defragmenter, verify there are no green bars, andproceed by pressing the "Defragment" button. If there are still some green bars,you can proceed cautiously (you can always restore from your backup right?), or seek professional help.
- Step 2 - Resize your C: drive
When the defrag is done, we are ready to re-size your file system. This can be done with commercial software like Partition Magic.If you don't have this, you can use open source software. Burn yourself the Gparted LiveCD.This is another Linux LiveCD, and is similar to Partition Magic.
Either way, re-size the C: drive smaller. In theory, you can shrink it down to 15GB if this is a fresh install of Windows, and there is no data on it. If you have lots of data, and the drive wasnearly full, only resize the C: drive smaller by 2GB. That is how much we freed upfrom the unmovable files, so that should be safe.
You could do steps 2 and 3 while you are here, but I don't recommend it. Just re-size C:press the "Apply" button, reboot into Windows, and verify everything starts correctly before going to the next step.
- Step 3 - Create Extended Paritition and Logical D: drive
You can only have FOUR partitions, either Primary for programs, or Extended for data. However, theExtended partition can act as a container of one or more logical partitions.
Get back into Partition Magic or Gparted program, and in the unused space freed up from re-sizing inthe last step, create a new extended/logical partition. For now, just have one logical inside theextended, but I have co-workers who have two logical partitions, D: for data, and E: for their e-mailfrom Lotus Notes. You can always add more logical partitions later.
I selected "NTFS" type for the D: drive. In years past, people chose the older FAT32 type, but this has some limitations, but allowed read/write capability from DOS, OS/2, and Linux.Windows XP can only format up to 32GB partitions of FAT32, and each file cannot be bigger than 2GB.I have files bigger than that. Linux can now read/write NTFS file systems directly, using the new NTFS-3Gdriver, so that is no longer an issue.
- Step 4 - Format drive D: as NTFS
Just because you have told your partitioning program that D: was NTFS type, you stillhave to put a file system on it.
Click Start->Control Panel->Performance and Maintenance->Computer Management. Under Storage, select Disk Management. Right-click your D: drive and choose format.Make sure the "Perform Quick Format" box is un-checked, so that it peforms slowly.
- Step 5 - Move data from C: to D: drive
Create two directories, "D:\documents" and "D:\notes\data", either through explorer, or in a commandline window with "MKDIR documents notes\data" command.
Move files from c:\notes\data to d:\notes\data, and any folder in your "My Documents" over to d:\documents.
(If you have more data than the size of the D: drive, copy over what you can, run another defrag, resize your C: drive even smaller with Partition Magic or Gparted, Reboot, verify Windows is still working,resize your D: bigger, and repeat the process until you have all of your data moved over.)
To inform Lotus Notes that all of your data is now on the D: drive, use NOTEPAD to edit notes.ini and change the Directory line to "Directory=D:\notes\data". If you have a special signature file, leave it in C:\notes directory.
Once all of your data is moved over to D:\documents, right-click on "My Documents" and select Properties. Change the target to "D:\documents" and press "Move" button. Now, whenever you select "My Documents", youwill be on your D: drive instead.
- Step 6 - Take A Fresh Backup
If you use IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, now would be a good time to re-evaluate your "dsm.opt" file that listswhat drives and sub-directories to backup. Take a backup, and verify your data is being backed up correctly.
With the USB-attached, backup both C: and D: drives. I leave my USB drive back in Tucson. For a backup copywhile traveling, go to IBM Rescue and Recovery and take a C:-only backup to DVD. Make sure D: drive box is un-checked. Now, if I ever need to reinstall Windows, because of file system corruption or virus, I can do this from my one bootable CD plus 2 DVDs, which I can easily carry with me in my laptop bag, leaving all my data on the D: drive in tact.
In the worst case, if I had to re-format the whole drive or get a replacement disk, I can restore C: and thenrestore the few individual data files I need from IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, or small USB key/thumbdrive,delaying a full recovery until I return to Tucson.
Lastly, if you want, reactivate "Virtual Memory" and "Hibernation" features that we disabled in Step 1.
As with Business Continuity in the data center, planning in this manner can help you get back "up and running"quickly in the event of a disaster.