Tarus, My preference is to use partimage. I boot the system in question with the systemrescuecd live cd , http://www.sysresccd.org/ , mount the smb share I want to save to , copy the boot record with dd ( dd if=/dev/hda of=boot.img bs=512 count=1, reverse the if and of to write back ) to the mounted smb share, and then run partimage with the gzip option, saving to the smb mounted partition. You can split the saved image to multiple files with a specified file size limit ( under 2GB if necessary) . On my 100-base-T network, it takes about 15 minutes to upload a 5GB (uncompressed size) to the server and about 11 minutes to download and write the image. It's OS independent as well. I used it here to install syspreped images of WindowsXP ( yes, we have an enterprise license) on several computers here .
I'm on the daily digest, so mail me directly with questions. Doug Newcomb USFWS Raleigh, NC -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
