Tony,

It is hard to get two people to agree on a precise definition for "bare
metal restore" - I think I can generalize and say that it is a restore
process that involves restoring backup data to a piece of undeveloped disk
real estate, e.g., a disk that isn't formatted or is formatted with a
different operating system, different flavor of an operating system ...
etc.  Some time ago it was the procedure that allowed you to boot from a
floppy disk and execute the entire restore of the machine without using
any install media. The TSM b-a client does not have a mechanism to restore
a Windows 2000/XP machine in this manner.  So, "we don't support bare
metal restore" really should read "we don't have a native bare metal
restore for Windows 2000/XP".

What TSM does offer is a restore solution that can be used in the context
of a disaster recovery, i.e., starting from an OS installation from media
+ installation of the TSM b-a client, you can restore your Windows 2000/XP
systems to a state from a previous backup by restoring the data and the
"system state" (MS term)/"system objects" (TSM term).  This procedure is
documented in the Redbook "Deploying the Tivoli Storage Manager Client in a 
Windows 2000
Environment (SG24-6141-00)".  We do support this function and this
procedure, i.e., take service calls and accept APARs for this function.
Users have been successfully deploying this solution in their
environments.

 Another area of confusion is "restore to different hardware" - which can
mean anything from swapping identical disks out, upgrading to larger
disks, to changing controllers.  These procedures require the backup
product to preserve some of the current hardware settings in the registry
after the restore, i.e., merge the information in the active registry with
the information in the registry that comes back during the restore.  The
TSM b-a client is designed to Microsoft's rules governing this registry
merge (see APAR IC34015 which discusses granting the proper Administrator
permissions for this to function correctly). Having said that, I must warn
that even Microsoft doesn't give any guarantees when restoring to
different hardware configurations.  You may hear "we don't support that!"
in the context of restoring to different hardware configurations for this
reason.  Customers have also had success doing this and our support
organization generally tries to help out as much as they can with these
situations.

Hope this helps,
Jim Smith
TSM b-a client development

Hello,
Tim makes a very good point in the last sentence of the 1st paragraph.
"It's
tough talking to TSM support when doing Bare
Metal Restores - I get the line - We don't support that!"...

Now I know I have seen some TSM tech support people respond on this
listserv; Could someone please define, once and for all, what TSM means by
Bare Metal restore? I mean..if they "do" support the backup and restoring
of
the "guts of Win2K in AD" (i.e. System State/Objects) Why do they say  "We
don't support that!"?

I have spoken with TSM tech support over phone and they say that they can
backup and restore the AD...However, the one answer I got over the phone
was
that they(TSM), will not say we support BMR is because they do not want to
get caught up in supporting M.S.'s OS. So please can some one define Bare
Metal Restore?

Thanks