[PLUG] Knoppix command line disk ghosting

Chris Genly chgenly at verizon.net
Wed Jan 12 02:27:23 UTC 2005


I reinstall windows 98 on my sons system every 9 months or so.  He uses
it to play games, listen to music, instant message, edit documents and
browse the web.  It takes about a day of elapsed time to get the system
back up to speed: installing win98, and all the necessary drivers,
setting up the printer, anti-virus program, open office, mozilla, yahoo
messenger, etc.  So I was motivated to looking in to getting an image of
his disk.  

I was tickled pink when I found a way to do it without any special
tools.  I just needed a Knoppix disk.  Here's how I did it.


# Boot knoppix, su to root.

# Mount the windows partition, hda1.  hda1 is the only partition.
mkdir /mnt/local
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/local
cd /mnt/local

# Fill all unused blocks with zeros to allow them to 
# be compressed when imaging.
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do cat /dev/zero >zero$i; done

# Free up the space.
rm zero?

cd /
umount /mnt/local

# Image the whole disk by copying it to another machine after 
# compressing it.
gzip - </dev/hda | ssh chgenly at 10.0.0.10 'cat >r2d2_image.gz'


I could even run 'sshdstart' and then do the whole backup thing
remotely.  Just too cool.  The image fit on to one CD.  Very convenient.

Restoring it is easier.

# Boot knoppix, su to root.
ssh chgenly at 10.0.0.10 'cat r2d2_image.gz' | gunzip - >/dev/hda


Surprisingly it takes about three times longer to reload the image with
gunzip, than to create the image with gzip.   I have tested the restore
by zeroing the whole hard drive first.  It worked great.  You get the
boot block, partition table and win98.  Everything.

I had such great success I thought I'd image my wifes system.   I use
the same procedure, but it fails to create a tidy image.  She is using
2Gb on a 10Gb drive.  But when I try the backup procedure described
above, the image file gets up to about 4.6Gb before I abort the imaging.
I found this very strange.  So I tried doing a disk defrag, and then
doing the whole imaging procedure including zeroing unused blocks.
Still a no go.   Anyone have any idea what might be going wrong?

Chris





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