Q&A for April 27, 2001

Welcome to Certifiable, your exam prep headquarters. Here you'll find questions about some of the tricky areas that are fair game for the certification exams. Following the questions, you'll find the correct answers and explanatory text. We change the questions weekly.

Questions (April 27, 2001)
Answers (April 27, 2001)

This week's questions focus on topics for Exam 70-215: Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.

Questions (April 27, 2001)

Question 1
You installed a new device driver on your Windows 2000 Server. When you restart your system, you receive a blue screen error. What's the easiest way to attempt to restore your system to a bootable state?

Question 2
Stephen has some sensitive data stored on a Win2K Professional computer that he shares with several other users. He wants to prevent other users—with the exception of Mary—who use the computer from being able to read, delete, or write to any of these sensitive files.

All of the files are in the ProjectX folder, which is currently shared out. Stephen configures the shared folder permissions so that only he and Mary have access to it. However, when Stephen comes to work several days later, he discovers that some of the files have been modified, and several have even been deleted. He checks with Mary but finds that she was out of the office during this time, and therefore wasn't the one who modified and deleted the files.

What is the best explanation for this problem, and what should Stephen do to prevent it from happening again?

Question 3
All of the users in your company have their home directories stored on a server named FS7. Recently, users have complained that it takes a long time to access the files in their home directories. The home directories are currently stored on the D drive, which is 6GB and has been formatted with NTFS. Which of the following actions could you perform on FS7 to improve access speed to these files? (Choose all that apply.)

Answers (April 27, 2001)

Answer to Question 1
The correct answer is B—Start the machine, and when the list of available OSs appears, press F8 to get to the Windows 2000 Advanced Options Menu. Choose Last Known Good Configuration.

Choosing Last Known Good Configuration provides a way to recover from such problems as an incorrect driver for your hardware. It doesn't solve problems that corrupted or missing drivers or files cause.

To start Win2K using the last known good configuration, perform the following steps:

Answer to Question 2
The correct answer is D—Stephen set shared folder permissions instead of NTFS permissions for the folder and the files in it. Shared folder permissions don't apply when a user attempts to access the resource locally. Configure NTFS permissions for the sensitive files.

Shared folder permissions apply to all files and subfolders in the shared folder and are effective only when users access the folders or files over a network. Shared folder permissions don't protect folders or files opened locally. To protect files and folders on your local computer, use NTFS permissions, which operate in addition to shared folder permissions.

EFS would have been a good candidate to use in this situation except that EFS doesn't let you share encrypted documents with other users. If Stephen had encrypted the files using EFS, Mary couldn't have accessed them.

Answer to Question 3
The correct answers are D—Defragment the D drive using the Disk Defragmenter Utility that is located in Disk Manager; and E—Back up the data stored on FS7. Upgrade the disk subsystem. Restore the data to the upgraded disk subsystem.

Both defragmenting the drive and upgrading the disk subsystem can lead to improved disk-access time.

The Diskperf command lets you obtain performance counter data for logical drives or storage volumes. Because disk counters can cause a modest increase in disk access time, Win2K doesn't automatically activate the Logical Disk object on system startup.

Although disk compression can reduce the amount of space that files consume, it can negatively affect performance because it increases CPU utilization. Although disk performance might improve on smaller volumes with highly compressible data, in this example, it would likely degrade performance.