My firm recently suffered a 5 day downtime due to a boot sector corruption on the boot sector of a SBS Windows 2003 server. After restoring the C: drive from the Backup Exec System Restore backup image, the machine was still unable to boot. The boot process gave a "OS missing" message. We then discovered that browsing the backup image with the Restore Point Browser also failed, and non of the files were accessible. We eventually were able to recover all the files from the C: drive by taking it to a Data Recovery company.
However, we now need to know how to prevent this happening again. The boot sector corruption had no effect on the system whilst it was up and running. All of our backups, going back over the previous week, had all run successfully, but had all copied the corrupt boot sector. It seems BESR only uses the boot sector when browsing a Restore Point. This was a catastrophe waiting to happen whenever we rebooted the server.
Why doesn't BESR check the validity of the boot sector when backing up so that we can detect when a corruption has happened without populating our whole backup cycle with corrupted images.
