How to resore if Master DB is corrupt.

[Guest_imported]

Hello everyone,
Please help me out...suppose I bring down the server for a scheduled regular maintainance and some third party software that we had installed corrupts the master database.
Now how do we bring SQL server up and restore master db from our backup. SQL server obviously does not start if master db is corrupt in first place. How do we go about bringing up the SQL engine.
Thanks
Raghu

 

[Niv3k]

If you expect this to be a regular occurance, I suppose you could take down the SQL Server, quickly make copies of the master db files, and run your third party software. If the master db is corrupted, you can take down the SQL Server again, and try copying the master db files over the corrupted ones.

Short of that, make sure you have backed up the databases of importance on the server, and then reinstall the SQL Server, create a new database of the important names, then restore from the original backup.

There might be another way, but without knowing the specifics of your situation, I can't be sure.

Kevin