www.winternals.com have released commercial utility NTRecover which makes
it possible for system administrators to access and modify drives on dead NT
systems using a serial connection to another NT machine. Salvage data using
native NT commands and utilities, add, delete or rename drivers or other OS
files, or even run chkdsk on the dead system’s drives. Useful to Windows NT
admin.
NTRecover consists of host and client software,
where the host software runs on a “good” NT 3.51 or 4.0 system, and the client
software executes on a “dead” system in need of repair. The “dead” system is
booted off a floppy disk directly to the NTRecover program, so repair is
possible even when basic startup code in NT, such as NTLDR, fails. The host and
client machines are connected with a standard null-modem serial cable.
The NTRecover host software creates virtual disk drives on the host machine
that represent the drives present on the client computer. When native NT file
systems, such as NTFS and FAT, access the drives, NTRecover manages
communications over the serial cable to the client software to transfer disk
data back and forth between the two machines. As far as Windows NT on the host
machine is concerned, the drives created by NTRecover are indistinguishable from
the local drives present on the host, and so they can be manipulated with
Windows NT disk utilties, including high-level tools like the Windows NT
Explorer, and low-level tools such as chkdsk.
Be sure to check out Remote Recover, which provides you all the capabilities
of NTRecover except that it works over TCP/IP LAN/WANs instead of a serial
cable. Remote Recover is ideal for high-speed backup/restore/repair, especially
when large amounts of data are involved.
