Is there a disk utility for Citrix/NT TS

[deejay33]

Hello,

My company owns a Windows NT TS with Citrix Metaframe 1.8. I was wondering if there is a disk utility that will work for this system. I was thinking of something like Nortons Utilitys where it can scan the disk and check the registry and things of that sort. The reason I ask is we would like to ghost the server as a backup. When we try to ghost it, the job fails partway through saying ther were possibly some bad sectors on the disk. I am a little afraid to use the Nortons utilities that we have because it does not list NT TS as a supported OS. It does list NT 4.0 but I am just afraid the utility would mistake the server for a regular NT server and change some things that it shouldn't. Has anyone used a disk utility like this on a similar system.

Thanks for any advise,
DeeJay33

 

[Jontmke]

I just saw this, sorry if it is too little, too late. But, I think you are confusing Metaframe with regular Windows stuff. What you need to do is a thorough chkdsk. I believe the command is: chkdsk c: /f/r
This will fix file errors and check for bad sectors. Look in Windows Help for a full explanation.


Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I must have missed this too - I know a lot of people who use Diskeeper and swear by it;

http://www.executive.com/coverpage.asp

In addition, there is a tool that will defragment your page file and registry at

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml

- along with many other useful and indispensible utilities.

Hope this helps

CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[deejay33]

UPDATE:
Well I tried running chkdsk from both the system command prompt and by right clicking on the drive and then clicking it in tools. Both ways it had me reboot to start the job but could not finish the chkdsk on c: It gives me an error saying it cannot open the disk for direct access. Per another web page, I tried turning off all of the devices that started automaticly and doing it again and it still gave me the same error. With all those services off I had a hellof a time gitting the system back up. I finally had to go back to the "Last known good hardware configuration." The worst thing is that since my first post, we have started getting frequent lockups. It happens about every two days. When the user tries to loginto the system (through a Novell login) the system just hangs. The interesting thing is if the user clicks workstation only, they can get in but cannot ever log into the network. It sounds like a client thing at first, but why would it work for a day or two and then just stop. That is why I think it is the NT system. Plus I still have in my mind that the ghost program says there are some bad sectors. Any ideas on any of that?

DeeJay

 

[BeerGood]

Sounds like your server (or in particular the hard drive) may be about to keel over and go to silicon heaven. I'd make a note of anything important like serial/license numbers and be prepared to build up a new server. Then try one last time to do a backup - even simply using the bog standard backup utility that comes with NT. If that fails as well..... ouch

Warning - any of the following could knacker your server. This is definitely a last resort.

Now - is/are your server hard drive(s)mirrored? If it is mirrored, try removing one of the pairs of drives and seeing if that fixes it. If it does, put the bad drive in a suitable storage bin (if you have sensitive info on the server, I'd pull it apart). If it doesn't fix the problem, then put the drive back in (wait until it finishes remirroring) and then try removing the other drive.

Not mirrored? Then, after suitably hitting yourself - or whoever set the server up in the first place - with something very large and heavy, get a drive that's exactly the same or larger, put it in and mirror the server. After that's finished, remove the dud drive.

Personally, it sounds like you have more than just hardware issues with the server so to save some pain and suffering in the long term, I'd contemplate setting up a win2k server and doing a fresh install of Metaframe on that.

Cheers