Full restore of Windows NT system

Was the NT administrator logged on when the backup for the NT (I assume
server, but could be a workstation) was backed up?  If so, the registry was
not completely backed up.  The Registry info for the current user is written
to a file (NTUSER.DAT) and locked - you will see it being skipped with an
access denied message.  Since the ADSM backup task is most likely running
under the NT kernel - especially if you installed ADSM as a service - then
the backup of the current user is not the administratior.

The solution to handle this is to run a specific backup of the registry -

DSMC REGBACK USER CURUSER

I keep this command in a BAT file that is run from the Startup folder, so the
registry is backed up each time I log on.

If you do this, the ADSM.SYS files that you copied in Step 6 should be ok.

I have not blown away my primary partition, but I did test by blowing away
the Repair partition, and it came right back up, vary cleanly, with the
customization that I had done to my desktop intact.

Jerry Lawson
jlawson AT thehartford DOT com


______________________________ Forward Header __________________________________
Subject: Full restore of Windows NT system
Author:  INTERNET.OWNERAD at SNADGATE
Date:    6/9/97 4:18 PM


We are not having good luck doing a full restore of Windows NT.  This
is just a practice run, but it is making us uneasy.  I'll append below
a description of the procedure we are using.  I would appreciate any
advice you may have.

Melinda Varian,
Princeton University

The following are the steps I followed to restore my backup onto my
machine from a completely formatted hard disk.

1. create a repair partition--at setup created primary partition to
restore my machine to and another small partition (ntfs) as the repair.

2. created boot disk--boot.ini points to repair partition.

3. booted to repair with boot disk, using disk administrator, formatted
the primary partition as ntfs.

4. installed client for netware on repair partition.

5. from repair partition, logged onto network, ran adsm from network and
restored to primary partition.

The following is on the primary partition:

 6. recovered registry--copied
from
        \adsm.sys\registry\name\machine\*.*,
        \adsm.sys\registry\name\users\default, and
        \adsm.sys\registry\name\users\"user"\*.*
to
        \system32\config.
(where name equals name of restored partition)

7. rebooted. logged on as administrator and user on local machine just
fine. try to get to domain as user and get the following error:

 System cannot log user on to the domain because the system computer
 account in its primary domain is missing or the password on that account
 is incorrect.

Tried the following resolutions which did not fix error condition:

In control panel, system, user profiles, removed user\domain

Removed user profiles in winnt\profiles

Removed machine from domain and created new domain account