This is mostly written for my own future reference.
After much experimenting, I have come to the following conclusions regarding restoring a full system from a Windows ASR backup. The following applies for a non-raid system.
1: Make sure the hard drive you want to restore to is the first hard drive the system will find. I.e. If you have several SATA disks then rearrange them so the system disk is the SATA-0 disk. Note that if you have USB drives then they might show up later during the install. E.g. my iPod showed up as a valid XP install disk alternative. To minimize potential errors I removed all USB cables (keyboard was on PS2).
2: Boot from the XP install CD and press F6 to install additional drivers (note, nothing will happen) and then press F2 to ASR.
3: Install the additional drivers and select the AHCI choice.
4: Select the correct disk to restore to and wait for ever for it to format. You do not get any choice to select partitions to restore to so the whole disk will be wiped clean. The format runs in full mode meaning that it takes ages to complete. In my case it was a 400GB (381552MB effective) disk and it takes about 3 hours to complete the format. I didn't find any options to tell it to do a quick format.
5: The restore started automatically and I got to choose where to restore from. I think I would have gotten into trouble if the backup was on the network as I didn't have any network drivers installed yet after the restore. Note that the ASR restore seems to create a full clean windows installation.
6: Now I got into some trouble though. After rebooting I could log in but explorer couldn't start. The problem was Daemon Tools that failed to operate. Reboot into safe mode (via F8) and during the boot it asked me if I wanted to load the daemon tools driver and without it loaded windows booted fine. BUT as I didn't have it installed I couldn't remove it either. This was solved via finding all two files with 347 in the name in c:\windows and removing them. Windows booted fine and I reinstalled Daemon Tools again.
7: The restore created on big C: (400GB) so I used Partition Magic 7 to reduce that into a 64GB for windows and the rest for my old D: (work).
8: Do all the other restores and move back all the files.
9: Done !
What drivers do i need for the F6 install section? i have no discs whatsoever as ibought machine from a friend?
Is there anywhere on the net i can get the specific drivers i need? i gather you can get them on the dell site but not sure which one si need.
please email me on soundmagus@gmail.com if you can show me where to get them.
thanks
SM