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Here are some of the new features:

• Automated System Recovery (ASR). This feature simplifies the restoration of the operating system partition.
• Goodbye, Emergency Repair Disk. There is no more ERD in Windows Server 2003. The only repair options are the Recovery Console or ASR.
• Emergency Management Services (EMS). If a server cannot be reached via the network, EMS provides an out-of-band connection to the server via a serial port.
• Online Crash Analysis. The kernel-mode debugging utilities in Windows Server 2003 can now run on the same machine as the operating system they are monitoring. This permits running a variety of debugging chores at the console.
• Volume Shadow. Locked files create problems for backup programs. Users get irate when you tell them that you can’t restore a file because it was locked during the backup while they were working from home. The Volume Shadow service takes a snapshot of a locked file so that the backup program can save the snapshot.
• System Restore. This feature, only present on XP, periodically takes snapshots of the system configuration that you can use as checkpoints for rolling back the system to a previous configuration.
• Online event tracking. If an application fails or otherwise causes a system error, the system collects information about the failure and sends that information to Microsoft, where it is compiled and analyzed for trends.
• Shutdown Event Tracker. This “feature,” if you want to call it that, requires that you specify a reason each time you shut down a system. This reason is put in the Event log. If the system crashes, you must specify a reason when the system restarts.