I will leave it to others to debate the wisdom of this strategy, but to answer the purely technical question:

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 2:06 PM, Guenter Fritz <guenter.fritz@uni-konstanz.de> wrote:
Is it possible to use protein and water atoms from the reference models to generate restraints for the low resolution refinement?

I don't think so.  You'll probably find it easier to refine the atoms separately, i.e. one run with reference model and the individual sites selection set to "not resname HOH", followed by a run with harmonic restraints on waters and selection "resname HOH".  Alternately, you could try applying harmonic restraints to the entire model, although I suspect that the waters and protein require different weights (or sigmas).

-Nat