Having DR recovered my share of NT boxes, I'll throw in my $0.02 worth here. The NT/W2K/XP(/Win9x) registry has entries/pointers/references/who-knows-what that refer to all kinds of things on the local machine. Including all installed software, user accounts, and hardware. To BMR a client, the target machine needs to be "Very Similar" to the source. Anything too different and Windows won't come up. Copy the registry, in whole, from a Compaq to a HP server (and do it in a BMR style, without the system up), and see what happens. Try it with AIX (or other Unix) - just reload your mksysb on a different machine, and see if the ODM lets you come up clean. Try a Mac - take the drive from one series machine and drop it in another one - same problem (Try that with an Amiga, if you have one, and it works up to the 4000, but that's a different story...). AIX has a nice trick where you can reload the mksysb, also having the AIX install CD in the drive, and have it go get what it needs to come up, but that's build into the OS. Windows doesn't have anything like that at this point.
BMR restore to unlike hardware is hard, but not impossible. You need to be careful what you bring down and apply to the registry, you need to practice your plan, then you need to practice it again, and again, and again. I learn something new on every DR Test I attend, because things are always changing. Nick Cassimatis Today is the tomorrow of yesterday.
