My interview questions

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I have made an interview lately and I'll post here the questions I remember and I'd like to know your answers because some of the questions are confusing and at least they were not easy to answer.

1 - What will happen if Boot.ini file was deleted? and how would you troubleshoot that problem?
2 - What is the difference between a delegated zone and a stub zone?
3 - Can users log into a domain if it's Global Catalog is down? and why?
4 - You applied a group policy to an OU that contains 10 computers and you found that it's applied to only 8 of them.
What would be the reason it did not apply to the other 2 computers. What are the steps you'll take to fix that problem?

Those are the questions I remember so far. Of course, there were some straight forward questions such as:

1 - What are FSMO roles?
2 - What is the importance of DNS in an AD domain?
3 - What is Global Catalog?
4 - What are AD partitions? ...etc

But those are what I call MEMORIZATION questions because they are basically definitions. So as far as I know, interviewers like to ask such questions in the beginning of the interview so if you don't know the answer, they don't bother themselves asking more questions.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

It would be wrong for me to reply with the answers to these questions.

If you have an interview for a role, and answer questions with ones you obtained from someone else - this would be falsifying your application, and you're doing no good for yourself, or your potential employer - obviously you need to have knowledge on these subjects otherwise they wouldn't be asking you the questions.

I suggest you read up or study the material on the questions they've asked.

 

It's not about getting answers. The questions are not MCQs. Answers would differ because most of those are troubleshooting scenarios. Books give abstract knowledge not troubleshooting experience. So I made this post to get answers from experienced IT staff to know how they deal with such problems.

 

we would answer the questions with the correct responses. What do you think would happen if you deleted the boot.ini file?

 

Questions like these would be the kind one should ask from a potential 3rd level admin, i.e. domain admin. To answer those questions, you need to have a relatively high level understanding of AD concepts.

During one interview, I received a list of questions which was very similar to the one you posted. I got the job because I was able to answer the questions better/with more consistency, versus the other candidates back then.

 

I got asked similar questions as well... Honestly, if you google, you'll find all the answers, they're not that complicated but still require understanding...

 

You've just contradicted yourself

If you don't understand the questions and if these are questions related to the actual job role - then you need to have a think about the role.

I echo this mans response - learn the answers yourself, google it, put it into practice and test (if you can on test equipment that is)

 

I have not faced that situation before but I would say system won't boot up because BOOT.INI is used during windows boot process. So I GUESS it'll show a message such as "Invalid OS" or "No Operating System found". About how to solve that problem...I'll go to BIOS setup, change first boot device to CD/DVD ROM, boot from windows CD/DVD, and then get into the recovery console and copy the boot.ini file from the windows CD/DVD to the C:\ drive. So assuming that the CD/DVD drive has letter F.

copy F:\i386\ntldr c:\

Now, I'd like to hear from you

 

Apexes,

I didn't say that I don't understand the questions. I said that I am not certain about the answers because I have never faced such situations. Again, those are troubleshooting scenarios not definitions. Even you guys (IT pros) may have different troubleshooting procedures in such scenarios. About Googling, that's not easy (at least for me). How would you google "you have 10 computers and you applied a GP to them and it applied to only 8...blah blah blah". It's a story not a search query. As far as I know, those forums are useful in these situations where you cannot find an absolute answer or when you're confused if this is the right solution or not.

Anyway, thanks for your reply

 

Thank Christ I didnt get questions like that in my Helpdesk interview ;)

 

Ok, let me give you an example of what I got from google
Global Catalog Server...did you know!!! - Bink.nu
Heh, ...which is the right answer that's what I mean guys

 

I would have thought having abackup server pretty obvious.

 

You would get an error stating the boot.ini file is missing or corrupt and the sytem would halt there.

This can be an indication that the hard drive is failing and quite probably other files are also missing or corrupt. Windows has a habbit of displaying misleading error messages when this happens.

Your solution will not work, because a valid boot.ini file does not exist on the OS media. In fact the file you have selected to copy *NTLDR is not the boot.ini file.

The boot.ini file points to the location of the system files on the specific hard drive and partition that was chosen for it to be installed, during the OS setup, so in many ways it contains variable content.

The way to rebuild it is to run a repair instalation. This is not the recovery console option it is the next press R to repair the version of windows that is found.

Failing this, go into the recovery console and try CHKDSK /R and see if that works
then FIXMBR, then FIXBOOT and BOOTCFG /REBUILD

 

Sorry, I meant boot.ini not ntldr. Anyway, you said that it won't work and I should make a windows repair instead. Thanks a lot for your reply