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Windows NT Magazine has frequently suggested that you need an alternative NT system in case the main system fails. (For more information about NT backups, see Reader to Reader, "Restore Your NT OS," January 1998, and Bob Chronister, "Tricks & Traps," July 1998.) You can then boot the alternative system and use it to access NTFS files or run NT Backup.
To establish an emergency system, you can place the alternative system on a different disk from the main system or on the same disk as the main system but on another partition. However, these setups are susceptible to disk corruption and unavailability. Another method for creating an emergency system is to use a SCSI Zip drive such as the Iomega Zip 100.
You can boot SCSI Zip drives, and they are large enough to hold compact installations of NT Workstation 4.0. A SCSI Zip drive will not give you a fast system, but you don't need a fast system if you will use it only as an emergency backup. The main advantage of using a Zip drive for the emergency system is that you can remove Zip drives. You can create an emergency system on a Zip drive and then remove the drive for safekeeping.
The NT setup procedure does not let you directly install files on a Zip drive. You must perform the installation manually. First, use NT to format the Zip drive as NTFS. You must use NT to format the drive so that it will boot NT. You can format the drive as various file systems, but formatting it as NTFS lets you conserve disk space when you have many small files.
Next, install an alternative NT system on a separate disk or partition, and boot the system. After you boot the new system, move its paging file off the system disk. (The Zip drive will have about 13MB free after the NT installation, so you could set the maximum paging file size at 12MB and hope for the best, but you'll want to move the paging file to another disk if you can.)
To change the paging file's location or maximum size, open the System applet in Control Panel, and select Performance. Then, click Change in the Virtual Memory section to change the paging file's options. Reboot the system after you change the options. Then, reboot the original system and use it to move the alternative system to the Zip drive. (You cannot use the alternative system to transfer itself, because NT locks certain files for exclusive access and does not let you copy them while the system is running.)
If you created your alternative system on the same disk as the original system but on another partition, adding the partition might affect the way NT counts partition numbers. You might need to edit the boot.ini file before you can boot the original system. You typically install NT on the first partition. In this case, the number 1, enclosed in parentheses, occurs after the keyword partition in the boot.ini file, as Listing 1, page 52, shows. If you want NT to boot into the system on the second partition, you need to edit the boot.ini file and change the (1)s to (2)s.
To transfer the alternative system to the Zip drive, you can use Explorer to move the files. Unlike DOS, NT does not expect the files to be in a particular order on the disk. After you transfer the alternative system, you must check its boot.ini file and edit the file if necessary.
When you boot the Zip drive, ntldr regards the drive as disk zero, regardless of its SCSI ID. Only after the drive starts booting does ntldr assign a drive letter. After the drive starts booting, NT assigns the Zip drive the same drive letter it would have assigned during a typical boot.
—Ahlan Marriott
Ahlan@Bluewin.Ch
Monitor SMS Sender Progress
While monitoring Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS) sender logs and viewing information about how many bytes had transferred, I thought
it might be useful to examine SMS's sender progress. I discovered that using dumpsend.exe (on the SMS 1.2 CD-ROM in the support\debug\x86 directory) to view the .srs files in the sender outbox provided this information. I wrote two batch files, sendmon.bat and sendmon2.bat, that call the dumpsend utility and quickly give you progress information about sender transfers.
Listing 2 shows sendmon.bat, which requires a parameter to identify the location of the SMS server you want to monitor. Sendmon.bat steps through each .srs file in the sender outbox and calls sendmon2.bat, passing the .srs filename as a parameter.
Listing 3 shows sendmon2.bat, which performs a dumpsend command against the .srs file and pipes it to an output file. Sendmon2.bat then uses the Windows NT utility findstr.exe against the output file to find the line that contains the sender status, file size, and number of bytes sent.
Place sendmon.bat and sendmon2.bat in a directory with dumpsend.exe. You can easily modify these batch files to identify other information in the sender status files or to accommodate other sender outboxes. (For information about optimizing SMS, see Stephen Garwood and Andrew DuFour, "7 Tips to Optimize SMS," May 1998.)
—Morris Nuchowicz
morrisn@sequent.com
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