On Saturday 11 Feb 2012 14:35:43 Terry Coles wrote:
> On Saturday 11 Feb 2012 14:18:59 Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> > Also, it sounds like you've made a filesystem in the destination
> > partition and want the copy to appear there as a file or two. That
> > filesystem will use up some of the partition's space for its own data,
> > e.g. what you see with `ls -l', so to image a 1GiB partition to a file
> > in a filesystem needs at least 1GiB of free space in that filesystem, as
> > reported by `df'.
> Right. So I definitely need a bigger target partition.
> It sounds as if it might be easier to use the technique that you've
> suggested and accept that I've got to span the image across two dual-layer
> disks. The trouble is that I only have one left...
Well after a bit of thought, I decided against using dd etc on the grounds
that it requires a fair amount of confidence in using the shell and I couldn't
guarantee being around if the hardisk fails again.
I also thought about why I had failed before when using clonezilla and
PartImage and decided they were both down to insufficient space in the target
partition. As a result, I used clonezilla (which didn't say that NTFS is
experimental) and wrote the image to the Windows partition, (which has around
600 GB of free space).
What I ended up with is a 10.7 GB image, consisting of a folder with five 2 GB
chunks inside. I have copied this to my NAS box. I then wrote a User Manual
which I copied to the same location as the image on the NAS box and put a
print out into the laptop box with the drivers disk, paperwork for the
machine, etc.
I'm now a bit more comfortable that we can recover from another HD failure
without too much grief. I do have a fall-back in that I could use the
original disk we created when the machine was brand new, or an OEM install
disk if I can lay my hands on one.
And they say that Linux is 'too hard' for ordinary users! If the machine had
been running Linux, recovery would have been no harder than redoing the
original installation.
An 'ordinary' Windows user would have been totally helpless in this situation
and reliant on paying for it to be fixed by a computer support company or
buying a new copy of Windows, (which I consider to be totally unreasonable,
especially since the OEMs pay only a few dollars and the user pays £60 to £100
for a one user copy).
--
Terry Coles
64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux
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