>>I have a DAT tape drive because I can back up the whole LAN while I (theoretically at least) sleep. Zip media won't hold a full install of Win98SE without having to change media. I use DDS-3 DAT and don't worry asbout changing the cartridge, and there's a great deal of data recovery information written in the DAT format.
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>My plan was to make an image of her hard disk once all the sw was in place and then burn that onto cd's for quick setup of her system and then would restore the data from the zip.
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>You can actually duplicate a win98 install by copying all the files except the swap file (won't let you) onto a new hard disk. Have done it many times for clients. No need for ghost or any of the other "special" programs for this purpose.
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>Do you know if the same would be possible under NT (without hpfs, just plain fat installation)?
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There are any number of backup products that'll do an image to CD or disk, in many cases regardless of target partition type) - the issue is a boot disk with enough stuff to restore the image in place. TAPEDISK, or DriveCopy, or Adaptec's Image Backup in EZ-SCSI 5.0a all will let me shoot a disk image to a supported tape, removable drive(s) or CD(s) and if things get blown up, I can boot from a DOS floppy with the image restore and get back exactly what I had to start. This works with multiple target CDs, and works on any OS. CSC sells a similar product for about $50.

The investment in the image backup product (between $15-100 dollars depending on what you want; DriveCopy is a good one from my POV), because it means that I can restore partition images of any kind to anything I can build a DOS boot disk for my LAN to talk to. I do file-by-file (including registry) backups because I'm more likely to need a file or folder than the whole shooting match, and when I do need everything, I'd probably rather start from scratch, since newer versions are probably available, and I can get rid of needless baggage in reinstalling. But that's not what you're setting up to do.

NT hasn't supported writable HPFS since 4.0 stargted; i assume you menat NTFS. Win2K handles all the FAT and NTFS variants, and reads HPFS. HPFS is limited to the Warped personalities still in existance AFAIK.