Disaster Recovery (fully restoring a System without reinstalling Windows and Stratesave) is supported for Windows 2003 and Windows XP Professional, local and networked. It is not supported for all other versions of Windows. Also the computer to be restored requires a floppy drive. Disaster Recovery bases on Automated System Recovery (ASR), which is built in Windows 2003/XP.
Full restore is supported for all Windows Versions. The difference is that with ASR Disaster Recovery, it is not necessary to reinstall Windows.
To prepare for Disaster Recovery, take at least a full backup of your System, including System drive and System State. Then create a ASR Restore Floppy disk with Restore Program's command 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 the Stratesave Restore program from the provided floppy disk. To restore over network, the Restore program 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. Select System Drive and System State for restore, then restore everything in single run. SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Portal 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). When you quit Restore program, 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 during ASR the system prompts for the ASR floppy disk, even if it is already in the drive. Press enter key at this prompt about 3 times in row for it to load all the information from the floppy and continue.