I have been running a dedicated Win2k3 web server with IIS6, SQL Server Express, .NET applications, and a few other components. Recently the main board on that server died. Our only recourse was to get a new machine up and running, then slave the old harddrive in. I am now tasked with the chore of re-installing ALL systems, components, settings, data, etc. in a very short amount of time. I have already gotten all files transfered over from the old harddrive. My question now is this:
What is the best way, if any, to restore IIS config (inc. SSL certs, settings, site routings) and SQL Server data (tables, data, and stored procedures) from the raw data files that I have on the old hard drive?
Thanks in advance for any help.
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This is not the best solution by any means, but after looking for a way to get past Micro$oft's silly restrictions on porting web server config files from one machine to another (without going through their export utility), I finally just opened c:/windows/system32/inetsr
That's the way that I would have brought the SQL server stuff back as well.
The IIS stuff will be more difficult. If you can actually boot this old hard drive in another machine that is similar to the one that died, then you can backup the IIS configuration database once Windows is running. Then you would be able to restore that configuration to the new server. Windows is pretty tolerant of new devices, so you should be able to boot from that old hard drive on most computers, even if it's not a server.
I think that if you got Windows running, you'd right click on the server in the IIS Admin console. Then select Backup from the context menu.
I totally agree with your method to restore IIS, franked_it. Unfortunately, the server was remote so I didn't have any control over what happened to the hardware. My other thought was to actually use VMWare's conversion application to create a virtual server from the D:\ drive, and then go through the process you mention. However, as Murphy would have it, I kept getting errors while trying to create the virtual machine...something about cloning service or VSS. That's when I resorted to manually re-creating IIS from the metabase.xml file. I then had to have my ssl cert provider re-issue (and re-key from my new csr) the certificates for installation. *sigh* ...If only this had been a *nix server running apache. =)
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by: luoshibenPosted on 2008-02-19 at 15:29:49ID: 20933652
I did figure out how to copy over my .mdf and .ldf files (from D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data)
Now I just need to figure out how to restore all of my IIS config/settings.