Seems to be my week for strange things falling in my lap to fix.
Guy called me Tuesday about a downed SBS 2011 server. He was working with Microsoft for the past couple of days trying to recover the server/store from corruption. The original IT guy couldn't/wouldn't help him. Tuesday it had been down a week. No email, Internet, server access. I had him backup everyone's Outlook to a PST file just in case. Told him to turn DNS/DHCP on the router/firewall so they had Internet access. Have a Spam box of some kind filtering email. Users can now access it via a web client to check stored email. Basic stuff so they could function a little. Called this morning and seems the server was hosed really bad. Microsoft couldn't recover the server/store so he is going to reinstall the software and start from rebuilding the domain. Of course he is hoping to not have to recreate 50 users, the shares, permissions as much as possible. Somehow I feel there isn't any good recent documentation around. He thinks he has a clean backup in an ISO format he can mount. It seems this ISO has the server as everything on C: drive. I asked about the server and it is a Dell server, unknown model, with 3 drives in a RAID 5 configuration. Everything installed on the C: drive. Who does that? The plan is for him to reinstall the software and then apply all the updates. Should be finished later today. Then tomorrow go there and help him see if the ISO backup is good and get the shares from the registry and import them to the new install. And try to see if I can recover the Active Directory from the ISO and restore that to the new install. If not then we will be walking around a lot rejoining the computers to the new install. I'm sure I left out a few things but anything obvious I missed? Thanks. Art DeKneef Avanti Computers Mesa, AZ 480-649-4430 Office 480-529-4430 Mobile
