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I am trying to not get frustrated, but I am. I have used a plethora of study tools, and each time I change tools, and test on that tool, I fail the practice exams.
I seem to have the hardware sections down cold, but everything else is questionable. I have used two different video programs; TestOut and QuickCert. Neither video program seems to have prepared me well enough. I also went through the MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit 
, but that did not prepare me completely either. I am now going through the Syngress book, MCSA/MCSE Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment, which I have to say has been the most comprehensive tool yet. There are tools mentioned in this book that I have not heard of from the other tools.
If anyone has any tips/tricks for studying for and passing this test, I would be most grateful for any help. I had set a goal for myself of November 2007, but that date of course has come and gone and I have not yet sat for the exam. My only consolation is that I have only been working on Server 2003 for just under a year, and have to study in my "spare time."
So, if you are an MCSE, or have at least passed the 70-290 test, please let me know what worked best for you?
A couple of posts back, I made notes for myself on how to in very general terms recover a RAID-0 or striped volume. Today I will quickly outline the steps to take in order to recover a mirrored volume.
If you loose one of your mirrored drives, you shouldn't panic too much, as long as one of your drives is healthy. What you will want to do is removed the broken drive and add another to replace it and reset the mirror.
1. The first step is to remove the mirror, which you can do by going into the Disk Management Interface and right clicking the failed drive. This should change the setting for the good drive, making it a Simple Volume.
2. After you have added a new drive to replace the failed one and the computer recognizes it and it has been made a Dynamic disk, you can right click the Simple Volume and add the new drive.This is based on much better and more detailed instructions from the book I am currently reading from the link on the left.
There are 3 main tools, according to Microsoft, that a System Admin should use to monitor and maintain Windows 2003 Servers.1. Performance Console- there are two parts to this, the System Monitor that has all the different settings for hardware on your server and the Performance Logs and Alerts that has a standard set of logs and customizable logs and alerts that you can set.2. Event Viewer - has the different log files on events that the server records. Application, System and Security logs reside on every server. Directory Service and File Replication Service logs will exist on a DC. A DNS Server will contain an additional log file called, appropriately, DNS Server.3. Task Manager - this handy tool is still the best one for looking at actual process threads. An additional tool that most techs I know use is Process Monitor, as it shows more detail than the built in Task Manager.
