I have a Windows SBS 2008 here that I'm trying to restore from backups. It runs as a VMware virtual machine, so I can use snapshots and try out stuff.
What happened
Windows froze and the only option I had was to hit the "reset-button". After that I checked the filesystems and found that the filesystem on the system-partition is broken, everything else is ok. The system is currently working although it has filesystem-errors but I'd rather not leave it this way and wait until it blows up in my face. I created a snapshot and gave chkdsk a shot on repairing NTFS, but as it turns out chkdsk breaks the filesystem completely as the OS won't boot afterwards and also chkdsk cannot be run a second time, because both hang while constantly reading from the disk with 400kb/s. I let chkdsk run for a day at one time just to see if it maybe finishes or at least shows some progress. I also tried every newer version of chkdsk. So my decision was to restore the whole thing from the backups.
The problem
I set up a second VM with identical virtual hardware and installed an SBS 2008 on it. I installed all Windows Updates in the same servicepack level as the current installation and took a snapshot of that state. I'm trying to restore from three separate backups: systemstate, exchange and additional data. Every recovery I did so far failed because something breaks while restoring. The first time exchange was broken after recovering the systemstate, store.exe just kept crashing when trying to start it, so I could not restore the exchange databases. And currently, I got everything restored and even exchange is working but .Net Framework and Windows Installer are broken. Windows Update is broken too but that is probably because Windows Installer is broken. I tried fixing both without success.
My Question is, is there anything I can try/do to save this? At the moment I'm leaning towards migrating to a fresh installation.