Abi & Chris -

I have a setup for Windows clients that is very similar to what Chris
described, and it works very well, except for the 640K problem that Chris
mentioned.  We have used it to restore 500M hard drives, and had people up and
running in less than 3 hours from the time the repair guy left.

My disks are very similar to what Chris described - Disk 1 is a bootable disk
of the same flavor of DOS as the machine was running. The disk also contains
the FDISK, Format, and chkdsk utilities, and a few other nice things like More
and DOSKEY that I'm fond of.  Boot from this disk, and you can partition the
new drive, format it, etc.  When you are done with the format, enter the SYS
command to set up the boot records, etc, and copy command.com on - this is why
the disk MUST match.  The second disk contains a skeleton of IBM TCP/IP, and a
basic ADSM system (DOS client).  from this you load IP, load ADSM, and can
start the restore.  I have to make several passes, to get all of DOS, ADSM,
Windows, and the "regular" TCP/IP product restored.  The machine should now
boot on it's own, although there may be some strange messages due to missing
components.  I then start ADSM, and do a restore by sub-directory branch, and
have him do sub-directories, too.  I have also found that you should tell him
to NOT restore anything that's already on the disk - it speeds things up, but
also keeps him from restoring something that's in use.  At the end, I power
off and power on, just to make sure I don't screw up anything with windows.
The machine should at this point look like it did when the last backup
completed.

Another was to do this that is probably simpler in the long run is to use the
OS/2 client instead of the DOS client.  The bad news is that you don't have a
GUI client to do the restores - only the command line client, but because OS/2
manages the memory on the machine, you can restore the entire hard drive in
one pass.  And you don't need OS/2 expertise to run the bootable system - it
looks like DOS, since all you have available is the A: Prompt.

If you want, I can share directory maps of the disks.

Jerry Lawson