Knoppix and PartImage to the rescue
February 17th, 2004I finally got around to figuring out how to image some various machines onto a newly installed cheap 5400rpm 80Gig drive I have on one of my home boxes.
I had contemplated tools like Norton Ghost and PowerQuest DriveImage but I wasn’t looking forward to farting around with multiple boot floppies to get network and PCMCIA drivers happening for my laptops and various other machines.
I took a look around for some Open Source stuff and came across PartImage, which comes on the Knoppix 3.3 CD.
I booted up my trusty Knoppix CD, opened a shell, and did the following:
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]# sudo su
root@ttyp1[knoppix]# mkdir smb
root@ttyp1[knoppix]# smbmount //myserver/bigshare smb -o username=myname
password: *******
root@ttyp1[knoppix]# partimage
… at which point, I was launched into the partimage program which has a full-screen text-based ui that is easy to navigate.
Within minutes I was copying my NTFS partition over the network with gzip compression at about 40 MB per minute.
I’ll have to do some testing on another machine I have, blowing away and restoring partitions. I can only hope it will be as smooth as it has been so far!
— update:
I just saved, trashed and restored a 250MB QNX FAT partition on a celeron333 machine using the System Rescue CD, following the exact same steps as with Knoppix.
Saved the 250Meg partition without compression in 2 min 38 seconds over the network, resored it in less than 5 minutes.
