Blind guess - are the network names assigned same (check net.cfg)? This is discussed in docs under "Post ASR Disk Creation Task" section. (as I said, just a blind guess)

Yes. I saw that. I only read that AFTER I read it, so i'm actually going to redo test from scratch and note the names.

Ten points

Well, that's not the problem. Just repeated it and got same result.

I started looking at the ASR.SIF file on the disk that indicates the following, (probably where it's getting that path from)

[NETWORKER.CONFIGURATION]
NETINTERFACE="net.cfg"
COMPUTERNAMEPHYSICALDNSHOSTNAME="ITTEST"
COMPUTERNAMEPHYSICALNETBIOS="ITTEST"
COMPUTERNAMEPHYSICALDNSDOMAIN="hei.org"
TCPHOSTNAME="ITTEST"
SEARCHLIST="hei.org"
EXEDIR="C:\Program Files\Legato\nsr\bin\"
SERVER="110.110.140.253","nwserver.hei.org"

[NETWORKER.FLAGS]
PAUSE="1"

I dont' know much about this. I wondering if that path is looking at the Networker server or the local client?

Do I get points for answering my own post? /grin

Ok - not sure where it fouled up and if this is a networker problem or windows Asr problem, but i did figure out this error and a solution.

It seems that part of the ARS recovery procedure is extract the networker client files to the local machine. They are contained in 2 cabinet files and they extract to the c:\program files\legato\nsr\bin. (my sorta jumbled logic from reading the asr.sif file.

For whatever reason, not all of the files were being extracted there. (that is, the 2nd cabinet was on disk#2 of the ARS disk set, which seems to not be properly extracted. (I'm pretty sure it was those in the 2nd cabinet that were missing)

Anways, to solve this, I took the CAB file from disk #2 of the ARS set and copied it to the c:\temp folder on the hard drive. It booted back up and is now contacted the NW server. (the way i copied the file to the workstation was booted with BARTPE and copied)

I found same error with 7.3.1 build 208.

However it took a while to figure out how I can copy that file from floppy, since you cannot start any programs on that phase.
Good enough is that after error situation Windows opens notepad and you can copy file inside open file dialog. So open Floppy select 2nd cabinet file and copy it with right click and then paste it into C:\temp directory.

Then when you close notepad, Windows will reboot and retry ASR recovery. However now it finds second cabinet in C:\temp directory and will continue.