We have a mission critical laptop called DEMO which is used to host all our application software's to the prospective clients. Due to fact that they all use different versions and configurations sometimes they clash and give blue screens of error. With the amount of services running on it it is next to impossible to analyse or diagnose the cause of the problem.
So just to be on the safe side because we can not afford to loose this machine it was advised to the consultant who the machine belongs to get it backed up.
The problem is that the machine has Windows Server 2003 on it and backing up windows has never been easy especially with this much amount of data on it.
I used Acronis Server Image 2003 to back it up across the network. But that was not the end of it. I was told that people in the past have managed to backup but in the last four years no body has been ever able to restore it. That means I now had to test restore it.
Now there are few restrictions when you restore a machine. I had to analyse that before going ahead but eventually I was able to restore it back onto another machine.

From yesterday as far as Dell Server 2003 is concerned using Winternals ERD Commander I could get all the data off the corrupted hard drive by putting that hard drive as secondary onto another system and just copied onto the hard drive of that system. But what happened eventually was that now I could not boot off that hard drive and hence not retrieve the server data files. I had to repair the Windows XP which already existed on the hard drive and then boot off that and access server files. It all worked well but to restore the Dell Server back we needed to get the 120GB corrupted hard drive right. So to achieve that we tried wipping off the hard drive using tool called DiskWipe.
After that I used the reinstallation CD for Dell server 2003 which comes along with the system to format the drive and do a fresh install of Windows Server 2003. the hard drive seemed to be working fine now. Next job would be to migrate the files recovered using ERD back to this reinstalled hard drive for doing that I had to dual boot the system using both the hard drives and then successfully migrated the stuff off it.