Fast way to Wim Server 2003

[edutech4schools]

I need to get a snapshot/backup of our old 2003 server before killing it and I dont 100% trust the backups that have been taken. WDS is not an option (I believe) as this is the only server and I was going to use ghost (DOS) to get a copy but wanted to also try getting a WIM image.

 

Most of the posts I have found go over setting up WDS but I just want to take a single copy of our only server before LEA come in and swap the server.

 

Any advice as to the simplest way I can do this or point me to a forum post if one already exists..

 

Cheers

[strawberry]

you can use imagex to create a wim file, or something like driveimagexml which can be run from bartpe. Also nt backup is fairly reliable.

[edutech4schools]

two questions.

 

Driveimage xml says it can backup live - has anyone done this on a raid 2003 server?

 

To get imagex working do i just neet a dos boot disk and the imagex file?

 

I have looked on google but keep going around very long winded sites about wim files and I thought it was simple.

[strawberry]

other fun way to do it is to create a virtual machine! New Physical to Virtual (P2V) tool from Sysinternals - Virtual Varia - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

 

Driveimagexml.. only ever done offline. and imagex i'm not sure i've always done it from windows pe or using mdt.

[Norphy]

To get imagex working do i just neet a dos boot disk and the imagex file?

 

I have looked on google but keep going around very long winded sites about wim files and I thought it was simple.

 

It is simple, reasonably so anyway. I've been doing a lot of this recently.

 

Anyway, the way I'd do it is to create a bootable USB stick with the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) and ImageX on it. DOS is no good, ImageX needs to run under Windows or WinPE.

 

You need a 1GB or bigger USB stick and a copy of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c7d4bc6d-15f3-4284-9123-679830d629f2&displaylang=en. The WAIK includes a lot of stuff but crucially it includes WinPE and ImageX.

 

Follow the instructions on this page to make the USB stick boot WinPE. Make sure you copy the ImageX executables onto the USB stick. Bear in mind that there are x64 and x86 versions of WinPE and ImageX in the WAIK, make sure you don't get them mixed up!

 

Boot into WinPE from the USB stick, wait till the C:\> prompt appears and change to the directory where you stored ImageX. Run the following command:

imagex /capture c:\ c:\server_image_file.wim "My Server Image" "Server image with Windows 2003 and software" /compress MAXIMUM

 

This tells ImageX to capture the contents of the C: drive in a file called server_image_file.wim in the root directory of the c:\ drive. Make sure there is adequate space to do this. Don't worry about the image file being on the same drive as the source, ImageX allows this. You can however add another storage device on USB if you want to and save to that instead. The two bits in quotes are metadata within the image file. The first is the name of the image, the second is the description. The description is optional, the name isn't. Substitute them for whatever you want.

 

If you end up needing to apply the image, format the drive using diskpart and run the following command:

 

imagex /apply c:\server_image_file.wim 1 c:\

 

That tells it to apply the first image in c:\server_image_file.wim to c:\

 

Any questions, feel free to shout.

[R0M]

Not exactly what you are looking for but if I was going to replace a server and I wanted a snapshot I would use VMware vSphere. If you get the free 60day trial you can take a snapshot on a live 2003 server and make it into a .vdi file. Then if you want to load it up later you can use Sun Virtual Box or any other free/open source virtual machine software.