Nathan A. Keirn wrote:
Actually I guess this is where my Windows Administrative knowledge will come
in. All ghost does Windows wise is run sysprep, sysprep is a free utility
that is part of W2k and XP. Sysprep allows you to enter License key, Net
Bios, and basically everything else that is entered during setup. So from
what we know now this would be very easy, make a hard drive image of a
windows install that had sysprep run on it, but no information entered. This
would give us a generic Windows install install that would be unique for
every machine it was loaded on.
I have been using "cp" to clone my Linux partitions. Of course, "cp"
doesn't format the disk, nor does it copy the boot sector. But these
are relatively trivial matters. A smart script probably also has to
take care of modifying, if necessary, the fstab file. But as MonMotha
mentioned, cloning a Linux system is a very easy/flexible matter, and
eventually the world will realize that this is one of the biggest
advantages of Linux vis-a-vis Windows.
Another advantage of Linux over Windows is that I can clone a Linux
partition on the same hard disc, AND easily boot into either or any of
the Linux partitions. Indeed, I have multiple clones of a multiplicity
of Linuxes, each and every one is bootable, on the same hard disc. The
command "cp" works for me b/c I never use hard linking. But I wonder
how ghost or DriveCopy/DriveImage handles hard linking?
With Windows, since I only have a minimum need, what I did was to use
Win4Lin to reduce the entire Windows partition to a file and run my
Windows applications in Linux. With this setup, cloning of Windows is
no more than a single cp command. Recently, however, Win4Lin seems to
have problems with the 2.6.7 kernel. Perhaps it's time to get rid of
Windows for good. (But a open-sources Ghost clone for Windows is still
a great idea and I will be more than happy to beta btest it.) wayne
