Q&A from the Disk Recovery Webcast

Hello all,

Here is the Q&A from the Disk Recovery webcast.  We are also in the process of re-recording it due to some sound issues we had. 

Question: Does disk probe work on SATA drives the same as an ordinary EIDE hard drive?
Answer: Yes

Question: where can we get disk probe? Does it come with windows xp?
Answer: Diskprobe is part of the support tools for Windows 2000 and diskprobe 2 comes with Windows 2003

Question: does diskprobe work from the recovery console?
Answer: No it only works from within the OS.

Question: Does this work on RAID Controllers with the correct drivers
Answer: Yes. Any drive that is mounted in the OS can be loaded into disk probe.

Question: How is this application used when the drive will not boot? Do you use a bootable cd? Serial cable from another box?
Answer: Good question! Since the tool has to be run from within the OS you would have to either slave the drive to another system or copy the MBR or MBS with a tool that MS can help you with if you open a support call or the easiest method is explained later in this presentation and you can make a boot floppy to boot the server. If there is a problem with the MBR or BS the boot floppy will circumvent that and boot the server for you. Again this is explained later in the presentation.

Question: I had a situation where a client overwrote their MBR with another OS... fortunately, I found it had an MBR recovery option, but what if it didn't? They had XP Home on their system BUT no XP Home CD to recover the MBR. They did have XP Pro CD. Can XP Pro CD be used to recover XP Home MBR? Do service packs need to be reapplied after recovering MBR from a non-service packed CD?
Answer: The MBR code can be rewritten from the Recovery Console with the FixMBR command. No the MBR is not updated with service packs.

Question: Can I use diskprobe to examine a bad disk drive (as a secondary disk) that will not boot up
Answer: You can use dskprobe to view any sector or group of sectors on any disk that is mounted in your OS. So yes if you slaved a non-bootable disk onto a bootable machine then you can use dskprobe to view and edit that drive.

Question: can disk probe work with XP & Vista & can we download it for that?
Answer: Yes dskprobe works on all versions of Windows. It should be included in the support tools and those can be found on microsoft.com.

Question: yes, but can you use a xp pro cd recovery console on a xp home drive?
Answer: yes you can use an xp pro recovery console to access the file system of any version of Windows from NT4 and later.

Question: Would it be good practice to create an updated Boot Floppy on a regular basis?
Answer: I would just create it as you need it. The files on the disk don't really need to be updated; however, I will say this, later versions of the OS have ntldr boot files that offer additional funcionality. For instance the F8 options in Windows XPsp2 and Windows 2003sp1 give you the option to turn off the autoreboot feature that you didn't have before. With that being said you can create a boot floppy with the ntldr and ntdetect.com from those versions of the OS and you would be fine to boot to any NT server or client.

Question: Is there a way to recover a system with bad sectors on the HD?
Answer: Yes, chkdsk checks for bad sectors. However, there are cases where the corruption is such that some files are not recoverable and chkdsk removes those orphaned files out of the Master File Table. In that case you would need a data recovery service to help with that.

Question: how frequently must you create a Boot Floppy or in other words what events require updatign the boot floppy? program removal? every patch tuesday? ...etc
Answer: The boot files that are put on the disk are updated with additonal functionality occasionally with later OS versions or service packs but you could use the Windows 2000 boot files to boot a Windows 2003 server because the boot process hasn't changed since NT4......until Vista where the boot process actually changes a bit.

Question: why would there be multiple 80h?
Answer: manually editing or 3rd party tools can mark a second partition as actve without removing the previous entry. It does sometimes happen.

Question: can a xp pro cd fixmbr work on nt4 or later or just xp, and are home & pro CDs interchangable for this purpose?
Answer: It will work on all versions of NT\2000\XP\2003. The code is a bit more robust for the MBR and BS in XP than it was in NT 4 so we can, for example, access the kernal file past the 8.7GB limit that we had in NT 4 but it still does the same basic process. In short you get more functionality with the later code but it doesn't cause the NT4 boot process to break. That's why we can install Windows 2000 as a second OS on the same drive as Windows NT4 and still boot to both.

Question: Can you recommend any books on this topic?
Answer: I like the Windows Internal books by Soloman and Rusinovich

Question: When is The Backup Boot sector created. Does it change over time?
Answer: Good question. The backup boot sector is created when the boot sector is created. The boot sector is created when a partition is created. No, it does not change after it is created unless that partition is resized.

Question: Does it matter if you run fixmbr or fixboot in recovery console? Does the order matter - will one mess up something else?
Answer: FixMBR and FixBoot only run in the RC and they are independent of each other so the order doesn't matter.

To watch the webcast, please visit https://www.msusapartnerreadiness.com/WS_abstract.asp?eid=15005003

Thanks,

BoB