It is so much easier dealing with nt diskettes than dos boot diskettes. NT has the ability to make recovery diskettes, that can access ntfs. In the bad old days, we made fat16 system partitions for nt 3.51 so we could repair the winnt directory without resorting to a full restore, and all the diskette swapping that entailed. We don't do that anymore, we rely on the recovery media. However, I should repeat what I said yesterday, in almost all cases, your laptop will still be booting from the hard disk, catastrophic disk failure is not likely to be the reason for a restore. NT will allow you to restore from tape the winnt and winnt\system32 directories even while it is running, as long as you use a tape made with the registries and system files checkbox chosen. I tried to ask my IT people how tricky this is but they have been unavailable. There is plenty of literature on the web about this, I know because before I hired IT staff I had to do this myself for NT 3.51. It seems there is no clear winning strategy for what you are attempting, I would base my decision on expecting any laptop in need of a restore would be still booting and connecting to the network. Worst case, you would have to load nt from a local cdrom to the laptop, so that you would have complete access to your backup device, then restore your backup image. By the way, if cost is no object, we migrated most of our notebooks to window 2000 professional, and the rest are running 2000 server (because they need to for the sake of the demos they have to run). It is much nicer than nt4 regarding the proprietary drivers and subpar performance notebooks generally have compared to similar desktops. Tom Turak -----Original Message----- From: Frank R. Brown [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 6:54 PM I normally have my laptops running nt, configured with a single ntfs partition taking up the entire drive. In principle I know how to boot up off a dos boot disk, but I'm not very good at it. Once, some time ago, I had the occasion to try to network an ntfs laptop from a dos boot disk, and I wasn't able to. I couldn't figure out how to get the network drivers and the windows networking client set up right (or even to fit on a floppy). Could you give me a little more info about how easy it is to run ghost off a dos floppy to ghost (or restore) over a network? The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech support at our newest website: http://freepctech.com