Some background: we purchased IDR when we upgraded to 11d back in January. It was a total flop. The IDR boot CDs didn't have any of the drivers the wizard was supposed to load, and after tremendous frustration, I gave up on it.
Fast forward to this weekend. Having updated 11d through Live Update, I thought I'd give IDR another go. I ran a full backup on all my servers, then used the IDR wizard to create a boot disk for a test server that I was going to modify. After testing my modifications, I used the IDR boot disk to restore the server from tape. I chose the automatic option.
It worked quite well; the IDR CD actually had the drivers on it, and when I selected to restore from a remote media server, it found the NIC and bound it. It did generate several messages about not being able to load help files associated with several dll's, but the NIC came up with the correct IP info, and I was able to ping the test server.
I moved on, and where the IDR program selects the restore media, it had picked up a differential tape that was overwritten weeks ago. Why it didn't select the full backup I had just run, I don't know (again, I ran a full backup, then created the IDR CD using the wizard). Anyway, I let the restore fail (I got errors telling me the media was no longer available), then selected "Yes" when it asked if I wanted to use other media. I created a restore job from the Backup Exec server and, using the temporary account created by IDR, restored the C: and D: drives without a problem.
Well, the server wouldn't start, and I realized it was because I forgot to restore the System State, Shadow Copy and Utility Partition. Not a problem; I just decided to try again the next day.
So, now, it's the next day, and I go through this process again, only now, it doesn't work. When I try to test the permissions on the temp account created by IDR (and, yes, I deleted the previous account and am using the one created for the new restore job), I get an error message that reads "A network connection to the server could not be established". This error only appears next to the System State and Shadow Copy connections; the connections to the C:, D:, and Utility Partition test successful.
I tried running the job anyway, and I'm asked for the two tapes from the full backup. Then the job fails, with the following error messages:
I've checked the links pointing to articles 281212 and 280668, but neither applies to my problem. I am getting really disgusted with IDR, because it doesn't work as advertised (well, once, but only once). I guess I can always restore in the traditional way, but then what's the point of IDR?
