G4L *is* smart enough to do a whole disk or a single partition. It is also a bootable linux CD. :-)
-----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 11:25 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OT: Recommendations for Simple Imaging On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:00 AM, John Hornbuckle <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a need for some pretty simple imaging functionality ... For payware, I like Acronis TrueImage these days. It's very GUI, and all functionality is available from the bootable CD. The UI is a little quirky at times, but the underlying image functions seem rock-solid. For free and Free, I use PartImage on the SystemRescueCd (http://www.sysresccd.org/). SystemRescueCd is a free, Linux-based, bootable CD. SystemRescueCd has the software needed to connect to a Windows network, and/or USB hard drives. To mount a Windows share (analogous to mapping a drive letter), do something like: mkdir /mnt/tmp mount -t cifs //server/share /mnt/tmp (Directory separators on Linux are forward slashes.) PartImage is NTFS aware, so that it only "backs up" disk blocks that are allocated for files. (It supports other filesystems, too.) I don't think PartImage is smart enough to exclude paging or hibernation files. You may be able to save space in the image by removing those before creating the image. PartImage works at the partition level, not the disk level. So if you need to create an image of a whole disk, you need to use PartImage to create an image of each partition, and then manually grab a copy of the MBR (Master Boot Record). You can use the "dd" command to create such an image: dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/my/images/mbr.bin bs=512 count=1 (/dev/sda is the first disk for most systems. It might be /dev/hda for older IDE systems. /dev/sdb would be the second. You get the idea.) To restore the MBR, reverse the order of the input file (if) and output file (of) parameters. Be warned that "dd" will always do exactly what you tell it to do, even if it's dumb or dangerous. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: 270.12.53/2154 - Release Date: 06/04/09 05:53:00 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
