> Hi,
> 
> we have a windows server 2003 server here and realised that its disk
setup
> is in such a bad way that we want to reinstall it.  Never having done
one,
> we thought it would be nice to try a bare metal restore of the machine
from
> the backups (to spare disks).  Both c:\ and d:\ drives are entirely
backed
> up by Bacula using VSS.
> 
> I was expecting to:
> 
> 1. Put a linux live cd in the server and boot it.
> 2. Partition the disk(s) appropriately.  Format them appropriately
(NTFS).
> 3. Start a bacula-fd in linux.
> 4. Tell the bacula-dir to restore that server entirely through the
running
>    bacula-fd (probably need to do c:\ and d:\ separately).
> 5. Restore the MBR somehow (windows recovery cd maybe?)
> 6. Cross my fingers and reboot.
> 

You really need a windows live CD (eg bartpe) or else you won't get all
your NTFS ACL's and other stuff restored properly. Also, certain
versions of mkntfs are broken wrt making a partition bootable.

I did experiment with patching bacula to extract the ACL/ADS/etc streams
from the NTFS backup and apply them using ntfs3g IOCTL's. It worked okay
except for directories (an artefact of the way bacula extracts the file
data from NTFS streams) but there weren't enough registry tools
available under Linux to make it worthwhile.

I've done the bartpe restore with XP and the same thing should apply to
2003. You are effectively restoring a snapshot of the machine at exactly
the time it was backed up. You can add bacula to bartpe directly or just
put the required files on a USB stick or something.

James


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