I have been following this thread with interest and I have another query to 
throw in the melting pot.

We are currently running ADSM V3 on NT 4.0 servers.  The machines are Digital 
Prioris HX 6000 series.  We have about 20 of this machines all provided by the 
same supplier.  However, we have noticed none of the machine's hardware setup 
are IDENTICAL.  Some have slightly different versions of the same network 
cards, different screen drivers, different firmware settings etc. etc.

As I understand it, you would need to provide an identical machine before 
carrying out the bare metal restore of the machine.  My question is if we want 
to fully restore a machine because it's gone up in flames, we would find it 
virtually impossible to get an identical machine now, let alone 6-12 months 
time when a lot of these hardware components would have probably become 
obsolete.

My worry is when we go through the disaster recovery scenario as described in 
the redbook and we come to the point of copying the registry hives to the 
restored NT partition.  

The problem is the registry data containing information about the hardware 
components of the machine because how can we be sure the machine will come back 
up if some of the hardware settings are no longer valid.

Now, when you rebuild the machine using the temporary partition, you would have 
 a working registry with the correct hardware settings so is it possible to 
"merge" these into the restored NT partition thus ensuring you have a working 
registry for that machine?  If so, this would allow you to rebuild one machine 
on any hardware spec. you like so long as the disks setup were the same (i.e. 
mirrored, RAID 5 etc.).

Has anybody come across this scenario before or has anybody any comments?  Any 
feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry this is message is so long...

Regards

Phil