I am removing this post as it is no longer needed. With SP2 for 2004 public now, we have backported the Backup / Restore work from 2006 which includes scripts for automating the recovery of the system after a failure (which is what I had posted here). Those files are vbs scripts so there is no mystery as to what they are doing, and you should use them, following the DR instructions in our online docs.

Thx
Lee