(I cleaned up this note as it was getting long - if anyone needs to see the
whole thing again, consult the archives :-)  )

I agree with your assessment that the redbook is NT 3.5 based - I knew that
going in.  Your comments partially addressed this issue, but I think missed
a
key point in my note, that I perhaps did not transmit clearly.   Let me
clarify.

The process you outlined (to simplify - run your ADSM backups while no one
is
logged onto the NT machine) is most easily applied to a server - after all,
the auditors would probably prefer that the administrator account was not
logged on all the time on your NT server.

My problem (and I think the growing one) is the NT workstation.  Despite
all
of the dribble you read in the trade rags, NT runs very nicely on a Laptop,
and we are seeing a large number of them being deployed.  Since corporate
policy in my company requires that we take Laptops home (duh) they are not
available in the middle of the night for backup.  Worse, when they are
here,
there is always someone logged on and using them.

Therefore, what people MUST do on an NT workstation machine (and this
should
probably be done on an NT Server as well) is to run (as part of the "all
user" startup a REGBACK USER CURUSER command to backup the registry.  (I
have
been doing this religiously.)  Then, whenever a restore is needed, after
the
redbook procedures registry recovery process is followed, and the machine
is
rebooted, another step should be added to run a registry restore (regback)
to
insure the customizations return.  If multiple users share the machine, it
may be necessary to do this for each one, although I am not sure.

IS there someone in IBM who can update the Bare Metal restore redbook
appropriately?

Jerry Lawson
jlawson AT thehartford DOT com



______________________________ Forward Header
__________________________________
Subject: Re: BAre Metal Restore on NT V4
Author:  INTERNET.OWNERAD at SNADGATE
Date:    1/14/98 6:11 PM


Even though there's been a lot of response to the NT Bare metal restore
registry problem I'd like to respond with the following:

After experiencing problems backing up the ntuser.dat file, this is the
file the holds a user profile (together with ntuser.dat.log) I concluded
that not all documentation on bare metal restore was up to date. What
used to be under NT 3.x for profiles is not under V4, that is to say the
profiles have been moved form \system32\config directory (which is set
for exclusion in the options file) to the \profiles directory. Thus when
doing a full back-up logged on as a user that user's profile (registry
entry HKEY_USERS housed in the ntuser.dat and ntuser.dat.log) does not
get backed-up it's locked by NT (check this in the ADSM log files) just
as any other active registry hive is locked (and no, excluding these
files in the options file is no solution). Ultimately any desktop
 persolization for that one user is lost after a B.M.  restore,  I think
IBM has to do a remake on the way the registry is backed-up under V4.
The solution to the problem is to do a scheduled unattended backup with
nobody logged on (no ntuser.dat locked), to do this you'll have to have
the dsmc sched running as an NT service using the system account (or
possibly using a local scheduler to call dsmc inc ...).
Yesterday I went thru the whole scenario without a hitch, I did a full
restore from a repair partition, copied the necessary registry files, as
outlined in B.M. restore, rebooted the system and the restored NT
partition came up just fine, personilizations and all.

Walter Ridderhof,     Mainland Sequoia,    Netherland