A year or two ago I was pondering about the best way to restore a
Windows system to 'bare metal'. BartPE is kind of nice for XP and 2003,
but is fairly specific on what platforms it supports, is legally
questionable if you are using OEM licenses, and in order to restore an
XP system you need access to files from Windows 2003 etc. I then looked
at what would be involved in booting Linux (via CD/USB/netboot/etc) and
then restoring that way. At the time though, the ACL's, ownership, and a
whole load of other stuff would be missing so there didn't seem to be
much point pursuing it.

The latest 'Advanced' release of ntfs-3g supports direct access to the
ACL's, ADS's, NTFS Attributes, DOS filenames (eg the 8.3 filename
equivalent of the Windows filename), datestamps, and possibly EFS too.
So in theory, it would be possible to extend processWin32BackupAPIBlock
to not only write out the regular file data, but also to write out the
ACL's, ADS's, etc etc. I don't even think it would be that much work...
although I've been famously wrong about such things before :)

The advantage of doing it this way is that you can have a single bare
metal image to restore Linux and Windows systems. The disadvantage is
that restoring to a different hardware platform where different boot
drivers are required is a difficult but solvable problem under a BartPE
boot but much harder under a Linux system.

Anyone else had the same idea before?

James



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