Windows Server 2008 contains new and updated features to help you create backups and, if needed, perform a recovery of your operating system, applications, and data. You can recover your server operating system or full server by using Windows Recovery Environment and a backup that you created earlier with Windows Server Backup.
Using the Windows Recovery Environment on Windows Server 2008 you can perform a bare-metal restore to recover your server operating system or the entire server itself. An operating system restore will only recover critical drive volumes that contain system components. If you would like to restore all volumes, you will need to conduct a full server recovery.