Managing and Troubleshooting/
Storage

It is difficult to discuss troubleshooting and hard drives separately, so much of this week will be a combination of information in your book, and some complementary resources.

During the boot process, the BIOS directs the CPU to locate the OS, normally from the hard drive. There are many places where this may be problematic, so before discussing how the OS is stored on the hard drive, let's first discuss the boot process.

Understanding the 200x Boot Process

If the problem is the BIOS can not locate the OS on the hard drive, there are several opitions:

1. Press the [F8] Key as Windows boots, to get the Advanced Options Menu and choose
• Safe Mode or
• Safe Mode with Networking or
• Safe Mode with Command Prompt or
• Last known configuration
• If your machine is a domain controller, you may also choose Directory Services Restore, or
• use Debugging Mode to move the log to another computer
2. It may well be that the hard drive is sufficiently corrupted that you will need to use the repair feature on the installation CD
   
   
3. This console can also be used to restore the registry, if it has been backed up
   

The new backup tool that installs with 200x also has an Emergency Repair Process that can be set up in advance;
Open the Back tool, and go into Advanced Mode, and Choose ASD (formerly Emergency Repair Disk).

A good registry and hard drive backup is your best insurance to avoid boot failures. But what to back up? Not the OS, as it may well have to be reinstalled, then files restored from backup. So, backup just the data files? What will read them? Backup data and applications? But what other files are required for applications to work? The Dependency Walker can show you what dlls and programs are required for an application to work.

But before you go backing up files, is your hard drive optimized for use? You probably have everything dumped into one big NTFS partition. What are your options?

Basic Disks, the default state

• Primary Partions. A basic disk can contain up to four logical divisions called primary partitions. Primary Partitions can hold Operating Systems.
• Extended Partitions. You may replace one primary partition with an extended partition, that can be subdived into many logical drives, but these drives cannot contain an operating system.

Dynamic Disks

• Once a disk is converted to a dynamic disk, not only can it be logically divided, but several physically separate disks can be treated as on logical area, called a volume.
• Fault tolerance can be added using volumes. Volumes that are being read are called mounted volumes.

If you have unallocated space you may open the Computer Management MMC (Microsoft Management Console) Snap In, and modify the way the disk is treated.

Simple volumes are on a single hard disk. But spanned volumes can span upto 32 hard disks. One of the best uses of multiple hard disks is RAID-5, a fault tolerant system that can allow a failed hard drive to be replaced, and missing information automatically recreated, without downing the machine.

There are other MMC Snap Ins, as well.

While on the subject of hard drives, many times you don't have a failure, but instead, just poor performance. Don't forget about the task manager to check if some process is eating up the processor, or dominating the virtual memory stored on the hard drive. (You may also wish to defragmentation and run error checking.)

But what else can be done to see what may be slowing down your computer? Logs.

There are application logs, security logs, and system logs that track normal information, warnings, and errors.

You may also create your own logged events in the system monitor.

Finally, error messages that are trapped can be read by Dr. Watson, but to avoid many errors, always keep Windows updated!



© R. Craig Collins, 2005

We rate with RSACi. Last Updated Aug 23, 2005