Introduction to ASR

Welcome to my new Blog that covers information on PC and Server imaging and recovery using a variety of systems including Ghost, Microsoft's built in Automated System Recovery (ASR), Remote Installation Services (RIS) and Windows Deployment Services amongst others.

In my first blog I am going to look at the somewhat underrated, somewhat under documented but very powerful ASR available in Windows XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2008 Server. I shall follow that with an overview of automating this process with a scheduled task - not as easy as it sounds!

OK so let's start with a look at what ASR is. I am not going to spend ages on this. At the end of the day the basics of ASR are well documented on the web by Microsoft amongst others. The first basic thing you should know is that ASR is built into the bundled Windows Backup Utility ("ntbackup"). The system is started using the "Automated System Recovery Wizard". After running the wizard you end up with two things - an actual backup in a location specified and a floppy disk that contains a couple of key files that identifies specific information about your system.

Secondly ASR is only interested in the recovery of your system partition (i.e. where Windows is installed) of your PC or server. For instance if you have a machine with drives C, D and E and your hard disk fails only drive C is going to be recovered if that's where your Windows system is installed. So ASR is not a replacement for your normal backup procedures and merely compliments it. On such a system you would restore using ASR and then restore any data on the D and E partitions using your normal backup software.

The next question is what does actually get backed up and restored using ASR? System state data which includes the likes of the registry, boot files and IIS Metadirectory (if Internet Information Server is installed) amongst others and services are all recovered. ASR documentation seems to imply that "data" does not get backed up and restored during this process. This may be referring to data as in the example above if its stored on other partitions. However in my experiments I have always found data that was stored on the system partition is backed up and recovered.

You should remember that recovering from an ASR backup is a last resort method of recovering your system. You should try using methods such as safe mode and last known good configuration before resorting to the ASR method.

To recover the system using ASR you boot from your operating source CD and then press F2 when prompted. You will be asked for the floppy disk created above and finally the location of the backup file. The floppy disk is vital this process but if you have lost it don't worry. This can be created again from the actual backup and I will cover this in the next section when we automate this process.

If you would like to comment on what you have found gets recovered and what doesn't and what problems you have found exist with the ASR process it would be great to hear from you. I will update the blog when possible from such comments.