At the time I posted the question, even after formatting the drive to a 16 bit
FAT and ghosting a 16 bit hard drive on to the one I was trying to recover, I
got an internal error trying to do the restore from ADSM. That STILL left me
with 2 unknowns,
1) Did the FAT have to be the same FAT that was on the hard drive before the
system
     went belly up.
2) Was there a downward compatibility problem between the 32 bit ADSM software
     and the 16 bit.

My question was trying to address the 2nd issue while I was working yet again
on the 1st.

What I found out is that the FAT must be the same FAT that ADSM thinks he took
the backup from. The restore process has a field that ADSM apparently stores on
the backup, telling it what kind of FAT was there originally and if they don't
match, your data either doesn't come back, or the machine becomes unbootable if
it does come back.

Now my question becomes how do I build a 32 bit FAT on the PC and have ADSM
restore the datasets? I have to assume there is some performance advantage to
not having to actually write a new FAT (assuming that's why ADSM keeps track of
the type of FAT in the database) but at some point I can picture a LOT of
people being burned by installing windows 95 from scratch (FAT32) and expecting
their ADSM backups to be good when ADSM thinks it should be a 16 bit FAT. When
I spend over 2 hours restoring files from ADSM only to find out I have to start
from scratch again, I tend to not be a happy camper and neither does the
cleint. In this particular case I restored the PC "5" (over 3 days) times, not
being sure I had run into a hardware problem or if something else was wrong.

If there is no way to upgrade the PC, I certainly think an enhancement request
is in order so ADSM doesn't play stupid and try to do a restore it knows is no
good.


Daniel Thompson wrote:

> William,
>
>   As far as I know there is not limitation on restoring data with the
> 32-bit client that
>   was backed up with the 16-bit ADSM client.
>
> Your description of the problems with the windows 95 box doesn't give quite
> enough information as to the root cause of the failure.  You mention that
> the client FAT HAD to be 16 bit.  This does not have anything to do with
> the ADSM client.  Win95 originally only used FAT16 logical drives but the
> current OEM version allows FAT32 as well.  If the drive was FAT32 before
> the failure, I would make certain that the drive is formatted FAT32 before
> the restore attempt.  Essentially, make certain that whatever it was
> partitioned as before the failure is what you partition it as before the
> recovery attempt.  However, I HAVE NOT heard of any problems with Win95 and
> restoring/backing up between the 2 formats.  If anyone else has
> successfully done this or knows of any concerns between FAT16 and FAT32,
> please share this info.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> Good luck,
>  Dan T.
> -



    Bill Ball
   Email: WBALL AT KENT DOT EDU

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