2 Mar
2003
2 Mar
'03
2:38 p.m.
"Robert F. Schaefer" wrote:
Anyone know of an easy to make and restore disk images
on peasea hardware?
I've got a few on-topic boxes that I want to use for projects, but I also
don't want to blow away the existing software as some of it is interesting
and hard-to-replace. Bonus points if the image is browsable after moving
but it must be able to restore to an identical state from basically the bare
metal. What I'm thinking of is a NetBSD boot disk with enough software in
the ramdisk to dd an image onto and off of an NFS mount, but before I start
in on it I was wondering if anyone else had a solution.
Jerome Fine replies:
As Bob Lefleur also suggested, I recommend at least Norton Ghost V7.0,
although V6.5 is not bad. If you are using a Windows compatible file
structure, then Ghost Explorer works with Ghost images in the same
manner as Windows Explorer - although it has a few drawbacks, the
least of which is that when Ghost images are combined, don't expect
all the date information from the file to be preserved.
On the other hand, if the complete compressed Ghost image is less than
the capacity of one CD-R, you can save it for long term archival storage
with ease. And with a bit less ease if the compressed Ghost image will
be larger since Ghost has the option to "-split=650" which produces as
many files of 650 MBytes are are needed.
I have been using Ghost V7.0 for almost a year with the option
"-FCR=FileName" that creates a CRC file at the same time which
allows the user to verify that the backup has been done correctly
BEFORE the original source image is destroyed when the source
image has a Windows/DOS file structure.
Ghost V7.0 also compresses on the fly at about 2 to 1 without a
great deal of extra time. On my system, I can do a backup in about
6 minutes of an EIDE drive which holds about 2.2 GBytes of files
and produces a compressed image of about 950 MBytes. The
recovery takes about 3 minutes. This is on a 750 MHz Pentium III
although there is an UDMA 100 EIDE controller with a throughput
of about 30 MBytes per second or about 2 GBytes per minute.
Note that although the documentation requires that Ghost V7.0 be
run under DOS, I have run it under Windows 98 SE as long as the
source device is NOT the C: drive. If the C: drive is being backed
up or restored, then I always BOOT first from the A: floppy.
Also, in this case, my UDMA 100 EIDE controller is NOT compatible
with a CDROM drive when Ghost V7.0 is running, so I always
copy any files that were on a CDROM to a D: or E: drive while
the CDROM device driver is active, then BOOT again without
CDROM support and run Ghost V7.0 with only the C:, D:, and
E: drives active.
For drives with any file structure, Ghost V7.0 can make an exact
copy of the drive and restore every block in the exact same location.
With SCSI drives or drives where the controller does the bad block
mapping, this allows the image to be restored on the same size or
larger drive. When the bad blocks are handled by the OS, then
the restore must be done on the identical drive if you did not start
with a Windows/DOS file structure.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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