SQL Server Magazine

Systems administration can be a highly personal task: The tools you use might not be the same tools your colleagues use. Nevertheless, certain items should be in every Windows NT administrator's toolkit. In this column I discuss these essential resources, which include 3.5" disks, CD-ROMs, printed reference materials, and online sources of information. I'll also clue you in to resources you can turn to for help when the going gets tough.

CD-ROMs and Disks
The most basic tools in your admin toolkit are copies of the CD-ROMs for NT Workstation and NT Server. Most likely, you have installed operating systems across your network, but sometimes when you change the configuration of a particular computer, you must supply either the CD-ROM or the network path where the files are shared. However, if you're trying to fix a network-related problem, you might not be able to connect to the shared files, so using the CD-ROM is often quicker. If you undertake an emergency repair in which you have to compare installed files with the original versions, you must use the CD-ROM, even if you installed NT over the network.

If you have a computer that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, you can use a portable CD-ROM drive, even though NT doesn't support parallel-port drives. To use a portable CD-ROM drive to access the NT CD-ROMs, boot to DOS (which supports portable CD-ROM drives with the correct drivers) and copy the NT install files from the CD-ROM to the hard disk.

Do you need the three boot/setup disks that come with NT? Not in most situations, but if you have to perform an emergency repair, you'll need these three disks to get the process started. If you don't have these disks, you can create them for your Intel-based systems by running winnt32.exe with the /OX option--it's in the i386 directory on the NT CD-ROM. (If you run Digital Alpha systems, you still must create a boot disk, although the emergency repair process will be different from that for Intel-based systems.) Create a set of disks for NT Server and a set for NT Workstation (they differ from each other slightly) and keep them in your admin toolkit. When you run winnt32.exe from the CD-ROM, it doesn't matter whether you are on Workstation, Server, or even Windows 95. To create a boot disk for DOS, run winnt.exe.

You must have an Emergency Repair Disk (ERD) for each server on your system (for more information on ERDs, see my January 1997 column, "The Emergency Repair Disk"). You won't keep ERDs in your admin toolkit, because each ERD is specific to a computer. You can designate a central location for ERDs, or you can store each one with its server. You can decide whether to maintain an ERD for each workstation: If you have a large number of machines, keeping an ERD for each workstation probably isn't feasible. A better workstation strategy is to run the rdisk.exe utility on each workstation periodically to update the backup copy of the Registry information it saves in the \Winnt\repair directory on the computer's hard disk. I recommend that you run rdisk.exe on every server regularly, or at least after you change server configurations. Screen 1, page 226, shows the Repair Disk Utility window.

A DOS boot disk can be a useful addition to your admin toolkit; it is especially helpful for systems that aren't booting correctly. On my DOS boot disks, I like to include utilities such as a simple text editor, the ATTRIB command (so that I can modify hidden and read-only attributes on files), and some utilities for viewing directories. If your NT computers use the NTFS file system exclusively, booting with a DOS disk won't ordinarily give you access to NTFS partitions, because DOS can't read the NTFS format. To read the NTFS partitions from DOS, make sure the ntfsdos.exe utility is on your DOS boot disk. Then, you can not only examine files on the NTFS partitions to make sure they are intact, but you can recover vital files off the NTFS drives. You can download a free copy of NTFSDOS from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell's Web site (http://www.ntinternals.com). To run NTFSDOS from your boot disk, simply boot and run the utility from the disk.

An NT boot disk is another good addition to your admin toolkit, especially if you have systems that boot only to NT. Whereas the DOS boot disk is all you need to start a computer under DOS, the NT boot disk only begins the boot process--it then transfers startup control to the copy of NT on the hard disk. Your NT boot disk will help you work around problems with boot files on a hard disk. When the boot disk has the computer up and running NT, you can fix any missing or damaged files. To make an NT boot disk, format a disk under NT, not DOS. Use the command-line FORMAT command, the File Manager, or Explorer to format the disk. Then, copy three files from your C drive to the disk: ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini. These files are hidden in the root directory of your C drive. You might need to edit boot.ini if you use this NT boot disk on a machine where NT is installed on a different hard disk.

In the unusual case that you boot from a SCSI controller with no BIOS, you must copy ntbootdd.sys to your NT boot disk and use it for booting. The ntbootdd.sys file is the renamed device driver for the SCSI adapter. Therefore, if you use the NT boot disk to boot another system, you might need to modify this file so that you can use the new system's SCSI driver.

Most of us end up supporting multiple network cards, each of which has slightly different setup software and drivers. I usually copy the software for my network cards onto each system, but I also keep a copy of every unique network card disk, and you should, too. If you have only a few network card types, set up DOS boot disks that also connect to the file server where you store the downloadable files for your operating systems, applications, and utilities. The quickest way to set up a DOS boot disk that connects to a file server is to run the MS-DOS Network Client 3.0 Setup program on computers that have each type of network card. You might need to edit the IRQ and Address settings in the protocol.ini file the setup program builds. If you don't have the DOS Network Client disks, you can copy them from the \clients\msclient\disks directory on your NT Server CD-ROM or you can build them from the Network Client Administrator utility in NT server, as Screen 2 shows.

If your antivirus software can fit on a disk, a virus scan disk is the next must-have in your admin toolkit. It will be helpful when your users report mysterious problems with their workstations. NT suffers less from viruses than other operating systems do, but viruses can still infect boot sectors in NT. I had a very frustrating experience when I set up a classroom full of computers (at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, of course). Three computers would not install NT. The install process would crash partway through. I finally booted with my DOS disk, ran a virus scan, and found a simple boot sector virus, which the virus-scanning software removed. Because I had FDISK on my DOS boot disk, I was able to work around the problem with the FDISK /MBR option, which rebuilt the master boot record on the affected computers. You can run MS-DOS-based virus software even if the file system on a computer is NTFS, and the software will check for boot-sector viruses. (For more information about virus scanners for NT, See Jonathan Chau, "Workstation Virus Scanning Software," November 1997, and Mark Russinovich, "Inside On-Access Virus Scanners," September 1997.)

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