I've been doing a lot of work with VMware lately and one ability I have taken advantage of is utilizing a virtual machine as a hot standby. The Servers I protect are automatically exported into VMware every few hours using a product by appAssure called Replay AppImage. It works very well but I ran into one small snafu today that gives me flash backs of the Windows NT4 days.

... "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem."

I remember back 'in the long long ago' having to manually edit these files often with NT4. The Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) paths were especially confusing the first time around for me.

scsi(X)disk(Y)rdisk(Z)partition(W)\winnt_dir


Well to get back on topic, Replay exports the hard drives into VMware ESX (or Virtual Server), but this does not account for silly things like the Dell utility partition! So today when I went to boot up my VMware hot standby, it didn't boot at all. It was trying to boot to the first partition, which doesn't exist in the VMware version... So, how do you edit the boot.ini when you cannot boot the computer? Via the Emergency Repair console of course! The seldom used bootcfg command can add, or rewrite, the boot.ini for you. A simple bootcfg /rebuild should get you back on track.

If your interested in Exchange, AD, SQL, recovery, or other full system snapshot options, make sure to give Replay a good look.