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Manual Disaster Recovery - How important are patches?

moniker131
Level 4

We have a physical server that crashed. SDR was not enabled on the backup job. We're looking at doing a manual disaster recovery, which states:

 

At the remote computer, install the original version of Windows. The same
Service Pack and patches need to be applied after Windows is installed. Note
the following scenarios:

 

Problem is, this is our SCCM server. We have no way of knowing which patches were installed prior to the crash. How important is it that we have the same patches installed? Can we try to restore on the base image? If we install all patches up to date, will that work even if one is installed that wasn't before?

thanks

2 REPLIES 2

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

I take that statement to mean you should patch the server to the latest.  If there are more patches, BE may not work as before because of the newer patches, so you may have to do some trouble-shooting.  Obviously, if you have the same patches, BE should work as before.

I would not install BE on an unpatched server.

Tried both ways. The restore job failed stating it couldn't access the WinRE environment. I did have system services restored (DFS, WSUS, etc). But after rebooting, it boot looped to automated repair. Had to mark the system partition active. After doing so, Windows crashed on start up. It blamed this on a symatnec driver file. I went into the advanced options and tried "Disable early launch malware driver" or something like that. This got me further, the Windows splash screen spun for a few minutes. Then it would BSOD with "cricical system service failed." We're rebuilding the OS from scratch now.