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?

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