In Reader to Reader: "ERD Updates," August 2000, Melissa Wise offers a solution to automate Emergency Repair Disk (ERD) updates. For Windows NT 4.0 systems, I created an extended script, which Listing 1, page 24, shows, that collects the necessary information to determine the cause of a failure and works with a backup to recover the system.
The script runs an update of the system's ERD, uses the Winmsd utility to save system information, uses the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit's Srvinfo utility to collect information about the system, uses Dumpel to save information from the system's event logs, and collects memory dumps for debugging. After it collects this information, the script copies it to a repository server. If you schedule the script to run at least once a month, you'll have most of the information you need to restore the system in the event of a failure.
To make the script work on every server in your network, you need to change only the repository server and drive letter variables. After you make this change and copy the script to the local hard disk, you can use the At command to schedule it to run as often as you want.
—Simon Lidberg
mssqlserverdba@hotmail.com
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