Testing

Now that you have created floppy disks to use to start the computer, created an Emergency Repair Disk, and backed up the Master Boot Record and Partition Boot Sector, you should use the utilities and floppy disks to practice recovering from problems. Going through the recovery process will force you to be diligent about making backups (Emergency Repair Disk, Master Boot Record, Partition Boot Sector, and data). You will also have an idea as to how long doing each procedure should take.

You should have a computer that you can use to do the following:

• Look at Master Boot Records, Partition Tables, and Partition Boot Sectors.

• Find the backup Partition Boot Sector on an NTFS partition.

• Deliberately destroy and recover Master Boot Records and Partition Boot Sectors.

• Delete Windows NT system files and restore them by using the Emergency Repair Disk.

If you have multiple disks in your configuration or have more than one installation of Windows NT, you should thoroughly test using your Windows NT startup floppy disk to start the computer from each boot partition. This is especially critical on x86-based computers when you have a configuration that has both SCSI and IDE or EIDI disks. Sometimes, when the multi() syntax works to start from a SCSI hard disk, you must modify the Boot.ini file on the Windows NT startup floppy disk to use the scsi() syntax.