Win95 Full System Backup to Samba box?

[Wayne_Johnson at candle.com]

> I have a small home network running three Win95 pcs with a Samba/Linux
> server (thanks, Andrew and Linus!!!).  All works well.
> The question now is what I can do to make a full system backup (including
> hidden and system files) from the Win95 boxes to the 8mm tape drive on
> the Linux box.
> I know I could use smbmount to mount the Win95 drive, and then do a tar
or
> cpio backup, but I'm not nearly so sure about restoring that backup, if
> necessary onto a fresh hard disk.
> I do have a single-floppy network boot disk so I could bring the PC up
and
> connect it to the network using that floppy, but then how would I do the
> restore process to get everything back with the same system/hidden/RO
> attributes set?

I do something similar with several UNIX systems (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris,
SunOS and AT&T) and PC Systems (WinNT 3.51 & 4.0 and Win95).  I've been
using rdump for the UNIX systems and smbtar for the PC's.

Most of the recoveries I've had to do is a partial restore (several files).
I tried a fire drill once on a NT4.0 system (a full restore) and this is
how I had to recover it:

0) Make sure you have a system repair diskette from that system.

1) Install NT in a small secondary partition (i.e. 100Mb at the end of your
hard drive).  This includes full network support.  I didn't find any way of
getting a diskette bootable network capable NT system, although if I had a
few more weeks I suppose I could probably hack a way. (Anyone done this?)

2) I used SMBTAR to restore all the files to the primary file system.

3) Use the NT install diskettes and the system repair diskette to "repair"
the /WINNT/system32/config files on the primary file system.

4) You should be able to boot the primary file system since the "repair"
will fix the boot record and boot.ini files.

How this will translate to a Win95 environment, I'm not sure.  Good luck.