I have had an easy time testing system restores with ASR NTBackups.
I wanted to try what I thought was an alternate approach provided by windows 2003 for full system restores. Using NTBackup, I made a system backup, and then a full backup of the C: drive (contains windows). Then I rebooted, put in the windows 2003 disk and told it to do a new install of windows into the existing windows partition. It did that and afterwards my plan was to restore the system backup, and the c drive backup. After running the system restore it wanted to reboot. But it fails to reboot successfully. The windows 2003 logo appears for ten seconds and then there is a short flash of BSOD and then it reboots.
I have probably not understood how one would use the system backup to fully restore an existing server. Should I have restored both system and c drive backups before allowing the reboot?
ASR Backups seem to work pretty well, but I'd like to know of other routes for getting a system back from full failure.
