To prepare for Disaster Recovery, take at least a full backup of your System, including System drive and System State.
For Windows 2003 and XP, create a ASR Restore Floppy disk with function Create ASR Restore Disk in Menu Special. To fully restore the System, reboot from the Windows 2003/XP installation CD, and Press F2 at the right moment (if you need to partition and format your diskdrives first, you can start a Windows installation from CD, until disk partion and format step, then reboot and press F2 for ASR restore). Then provide the prepared floppy disk. ASR will format your system drive and run Stratesave from the provided floppy disk. To restore over network, Stratesave allows you to configure Network, set the computer's name and map Network drives. You can then fully restore the System, locally if it was local backup or remotely from backup server over network.
Warning: ASR on Windows XP and Windows 2003 will repartition and reformat your entire system hard disk with all partitions. If you don’t like that, prepare and use a BART PE CD/DVD to boot and start Stratesave.
For Windows 2008/Vista, prepare a Windows PE CD/DVD, or the freely available VistaPE. Boot from that CD/DVD and start Stratesave. Use NETSH-command to configure network under Windows PE, and NET-command to map remote drives. Windows PE per default has the US keyboard defined. If you don't have a US keyboard on your PC, you need to know where special characters are positioned on the US keyboard. For restoring remotely of Windows 2008/Vista, VistaPE is required because Server Service is not included with Windows PE.
Select System Drive and System State for restore, then restore everything in single run. SQL Server, Exchange Server and VSS databases cannot be restored during ASR, so they have to be restored in a later step (not always necessary for VSS databases, see below). On Windows 2003 and XP ASR, when you quit Stratesave, the System automatically reboots. Removable Storage Manager (RSM) for tape autoloaders can't be used during disaster recovery for local restores. Tapes and tape autoloaders can be used in SCSI direct mode, but not through RSM.
If the System is fully restored with System State, files and directories, it might not be necessary to also restore the VSS databases, because they were backed up as files under VSS, and therefore restored with full restore.
Currently there is following known issue with ASR Disaster Recovery Restore on Windows 2003:
MSDTC service may not start correctly after ASR restore. If eventlog shows MSDTC failed to start, run
following command from Command Prompt:
MSDTC -resetlog
Also if during reboot the system spends very long time with "Applying computer settings...", with practically no disk activity, try following: Reboot the computer, press F8 during reboot, and select Safe Mode. Then open command window, and run command MSDTC -resetlog. Then reboot again.
On Windows XP leave the ASR floppy in the drive while the ASR Windows is installed. At the end of the ASR Windows installation after the reboot a Command Prompt pops up and prompts to put the floppy into the drive. Then the Stratesave files are copied from floppy and Stratesave will be started.
Another possibility is to install Windows in a separate partition, and fully restore the original Windows from there. In this case, again restore all files and directories, but not System State, Service State and other databases. Restoring all files is sufficient from a VSS Full backup. But during backup, System State, Service State and VSS should be selected. This will ensure that the System state files like registry are correctly backed up in cooperation with Windows.
A last possibility is to Reinstall Windows and make a Full Restore, replacing the current system with the backed up one. But ASR or BART or other PE is better than overwriting running system. Full restore must be done in Directory Services Restore Mode, even on Windows XP.