> Although I haven't tested it on a bare metal restore, I believe that
> my code that runs subinacl (and also optionally getfacl) to back up
> the Windows ACL's should take care of all file ownership, permissions,
> and ACLs (note that 'getfacl' only captures a subset of the full
> Windows acl's).
Does this happen to include the "hidden" and "system" attributes?
> Of course, beyond that there are other potential NTFS 'features' that
> might not get restored such as junctions, alternative data streams,
> etc. -- though typically they are rare in WinXP.
In theory, junctions would be recreated by any hard links in the tar file,
though I didn't have any reason to try it out.
> Thanks for the write-up - very helpful!
> Couple of questions:
> 1. Once you have installed cygwin, why not just use rsync to restore
> rather than first creating a tar archive?
The main reason is those three hardcoded directory paths -- chiefly
C:\WINDOWS, which tends to have a lot of open files that cannot be
overwritten. I suppose you could restore those three directories to
alternative locations, but in my experimenting, rsync would throw errors
and stop working, I'm not sure why.
> 2. Is the Recovery Console approach necessary? I believe that WinXP
> Home bundled by a lot of hardware vendors doesn't include
> it. Couldn't you just restore a bare-bones configuration, boot it
> up and then proceed as you did
It's included on every XP CD that I'm aware of, including Home, but it
does need to be either installed (for OEM versions, from the \i386
directory) or booted from (some vendors place it on a recovery or tools
partition.)
It's necessary in that I know no other way to replace the "windows"
directory.
> 3. Can you explain the reason for "set AllowWildCards = TRUE"?
> Also, more generally, what if anything is the advantage of using
> the MS shell to rename rather than just using cygwin 'mv'? Does
> 'ren' do a better job with setting default ACL's.
Err... Whoops, that was supposed to read "set AllowAllPaths = TRUE" not
WildCards, which doesn't do a lot.
It's required only because otherwise, the Recovery Console won't let you
do anything outside \WINDOWS.
> 4. How are you able to rename for example the WINDOWS directory since
> it presumably has open files? (or is this the reason and rationale
> behind using the recovery console)
That's exactly the reason behind using the Recovery Console.
> 5. At what point in the process did you restore the registry or did
> you just treat them as regular files that are part of your backuppc
> backup?
The registry was backed up as regular files using Volume Shadow Copies,
and restored as regular files into the same locations. Switching the
"\WINDOWS" directories switched the registry, as well as all related
files.
> 6. Rather than installing cygwin, using the Recovery console etc.,
> would it be faster/simpler/safer to boot from a Linux cd/dvd (after
> creating the minimalist system install) and then from linux restore
> the backuppc shares and rename the directories. Then you could boot
> back up (hopefully) in Windows and run subinacl if you want to make
> sure the acls's are all correct.
I did try this, and it didn't work -- in my case, because Linux didn't
happen to recognize my controller card, or its metadata for the mirror --
and when I tried it on another system, for reasons I'm uncertain of, it
threw errors with the tar file for some paths, and choked on symbolic
links. Due to the driver issues, I didn't pursue it further. (I had
hoped for something relatively simple, like booting to a LiveCD, mounting
the drives using ntfs-3g, and simply rsync'ing the latest recovery; I
assume this is probably possible with the right tweaking and drivers.)
> Thanks again for sharing your experiences...
>
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