Michael,
to provide disaster recovery for the system drives, we're trying out a
tool called ghost professional (from ghost software). It allows to do a
kind of intelligent image copy after you just booted DOS (which is
simple using only one floppy disk).
The type of filesystem (FAT, NTFS, HPFS...) is unimportant to ghost, I
tried to copy a complete NTFS partition and ghost had no problems. The
image is written to one or more files on al local FAT filesystem or any
network resource that is accessible after having booted DOS.
When restoring, ghost can resize the destination partition and create an
NTFS partition on its own without using NT's functions. So, when you've
copied the image file to a cdrom, you can restore the system partition
using only one floppy disk and one CDROM. As you need the CDROM writer
only to create the cdrom and not to read from it, you don't need
additional hardware for your recovery.

We're going to try out the tool on our larger systems (until now I only
tested on small "play"-servers). I'll post a report about our
experiences later.

Regards,
Michael
--
Michael H. Bartl
Michael H. Bartl
ADAC e.V. (Rechenzentrum, Produktionsplanung und Organisation)
Tel.: (089) 7676-4063, Fax: (089) 7676-8161
EMail: Michael.Bartl AT Zentrale.ADAC DOT de

>----------
>Von:   Michael R Vogt[SMTP:vogt AT AUK.NIST DOT GOV]
>Gesendet:      Freitag, 31. Oktober 1997 19:53
>An:    ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
>Betreff:       Re: Bare metal restore from a CD .....
>
>> He has several large servers that we are backing up, and he is thinking
>>about
>> bare metal disaster recovery.  He has seen the ADSM from a ZIP drive
>>writeup
>> from the redbook, but he was thinking more along the lines of having a
>> skeleton NT installed on a CD.  The presumption here is that we would
>>install
>> NT to a CD that is writeable, then add ADSM.  The question he had was did I
>> think this would work!  :-(>
>
>I had the idea of doing the same thing only using a parallel-port removable
>drive (Iomega or SyQuest). I figured that all our NT clients had parallel
>ports, but not all had the same brand of CDROM, and you can't write to the
>CDROM, so it would be easier to do with a removable drive.  Wrong.  I've
>spent quite a bit of time trying, but haven't yet figured out how to boot
>the damned thing...
>