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fitzpab

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SBS 2003 crash - how to restore to different hardware

Hello,
Wanted to get some expert opinions on the best way to go about restoring a crashed server.  Have an SBS 2003 server with exchange 2003 running.  The flat file data (word, excel, cad, etc.) is on a seperate member server so I was able to give users direct access to their data.

Purchased a new server (different hw platform) arriving today.  I have a good SBS full backup from 2 days ago and a full image based backup from 2 months ago (zenith infotech bdr server which crashes every month but the image backups are good).

I can do a bare metal restore with the image backup but not with the SBS backup (as far as I know).  If I had a good 2 day old image backup (and not 2 months old), I would restore that and we'd be up and running.

My plan was to do (step1)  the bare metal restore with the 2 month old image, then (step2) to restore the active directory and exchange with the sbs backup (most recent).   Not sure how to do that STEP2.   If there is a way to do a Bare Metal Restore with an SBS backup, that would make it easier but I haven't ever done that (totally different hw platform, raid card, etc.)
Any advice would be appreciated
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Steve Smith
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Download install and run the demo of Symantec BESR

Save image to NAS or external hard drive

boot new server using BESR recovery disc

restore image

done

(and in a fraction of the time)
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fitzpab

ASKER

Great idea but the old server is crashed so I can't get it running to be able to save an image.   The zenith infotech is like the Symantec BESR.  If my backup for that wasn't 2 months old, I would have done that restore already.

Thanks for the thoughts though!  I appreciate it
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CorpComp

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Thanks Corpcom.  We are in the process of the bare metal restore right now.    I've done a ton of SBS restores to the same hardware platform so am pretty familiar with it.  Since this is different hardware, can't do a full restore because of the HW differences.

So I think we are going to do a ACTIVE DIRECTORY RESTORE to get active directory up to current  8.24.10 (after a successful BDR restore back to 6.22.10).   Then if that works, to do an exchange db only restore to get us from 6.22 to 8.24
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ASKER

Restored last good image backup (2 months ago)
Was able to copy logs and message store (mdbdata folder) to an external USB by booting in safe mode off a single disk.  
-was able to restore public folder and replay transaction logs but not the mailbox store (priv1.stm was corrupt)
-had to export users outlook ost profiles to PST files and import those manually.
-endded up working with MS support for hours to replay transaction logs put together from the image backup, and restored logs (very tricky).
Then had to run numerous eseutil flags to repair database.  Finally are there.