Create an image of HD using (dd), resize NTFS with qparted

[jmarsden]

Does anyone use anything else (F/OSS) for this same purpose?

Check out g4u at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ if you need to do this on any serious scale using FOSS. Allows copying disk and partition images across the network, etc.

Note that copying a smaller drive image to a big drive will not (in my experience) destroy anything, it just wastes space on the bigger drive. You can recover the drive using any fdisk utility to re-write its MBR and partition table. This applies to physical hard drives, I have no experience playing these sorts of games with flash drives.

I highly recommend that you do plenty of "playing" with a couple of spare hard drives before using this stuff on precious "must be saved at all costs" data!

Final comment: Do not use g4l, it is a ripoff of older g4u code, and should be avoided.

Jonathan

[CypherBit]

Thank you for your suggestion jmarsden. I'm aware of both g4u and g4l (and the story behind them). The scale won't be so big and using FTP is almost out of the question, I usually hook up one HDD using an USB/IDE adapter and just copy over.

The above has worked quite well on half a dozen machines the only thing is I'm still using two CDs for the job.

[Flash]

Here's the Qparted home page. There's another partitioning program for Linux called Gparted. One or the other may run in Puppy if you have the right version of Qt installed. If one does, you could either remaster Puppy to include it, or try a multisession Puppy.

[Ted Dog]

Thank you GuestToo. I'll give SystemRescueCd a try to see if Partimage does what I want it to and report back my findings.

Yeah, the newer version does not work like the last version. I was able to resize and growisofs backup directly from SystemRescueCD (or DVD multisession also works in the last version) I would reboot after resizing let windows 'cleanup' , then boot puppy and backup drive to DVD.

[drewmeister]

Ted Dog, last Christmas you started this with a list of dd command lines to back up various parts of hard drives to <image>.raw. The next day you posted excellent advice on how to back up /root to CD/DVD-RW that wouldbe in the drive if you booted a multi-session DVD.

growisofs -M /dev/dvd -D -J -R -quiet -new-dir-mode 0755 -graft-points `date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M"`=/root

And how to remake a RW DVD with your own default setting (two cmd lines)

growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -D -J -R -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table /livecd/

growisofs -M /dev/dvd -D -J -R -quiet -new-dir-mode 0755 -graft-points `date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M"`=/root

My problem is that I use Puppy 2.0.1 multi-session, not RW but DVD-R. I have become scared that I don't have a backup of that DVD. Once, ok maybe two or three times, I have put the boot DVD back in the drive upside down (pretty easy to do when the computer is turned on it's side/edge to save space) and Puppy's save said to put a blank DVD in the drive. Then Pup proceeds to save on the new dvd NOT.

So I am looking for dd and/or growisofs commands to write a new dvd (equivilent of writing e.g. puppy-seamonkey-2.02.iso to a new, blank dvd) and then writing /root as the first saved session.

Note: The Puppy I have been using no longer correctly writes an iso file to disc. Don't know what that's about, maybe I should try upgrading to 2.0.2, but I can't as long as this problem exists, and it would be great to make a new disc using growisofs or dd even.

Can ya hep me, Ted Dog?

Still living in New Orleans, if you call this living ...

[drewmeister]

Ted Dog, last Christmas you started this with a list of dd command lines to back up various parts of hard drives to <image>.raw. The next day you posted excellent advice on how to back up /root to CD/DVD-RW that wouldbe in the drive if you booted a multi-session DVD.

growisofs -M /dev/dvd -D -J -R -quiet -new-dir-mode 0755 -graft-points `date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M"`=/root

And how to remake a RW DVD with your own default setting (two cmd lines)

growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -D -J -R -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table /livecd/

growisofs -M /dev/dvd -D -J -R -quiet -new-dir-mode 0755 -graft-points `date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M"`=/root

My problem is that I use Puppy 2.0.1 multi-session, not RW but DVD-R. I have become scared that I don't have a backup of that DVD. Once, ok maybe two or three times, I have put the boot DVD back in the drive upside down (pretty easy to do when the computer is turned on it's side/edge to save space) and Puppy's save said to put a blank DVD in the drive. Then Pup proceeds to save on the new dvd NOT.

So I am looking for dd and/or growisofs commands to write a new dvd (equivilent of writing e.g. puppy-seamonkey-2.02.iso to a new, blank dvd) and then writing /root as the first saved session.

Note: The Puppy I have been using no longer correctly writes an iso file to disc. Don't know what that's about, maybe I should try upgrading to 2.0.2, but I can't as long as this problem exists, and it would be great to make a new disc using growisofs or dd even.

Can ya hep me, Ted Dog?

Still living in New Orleans, if you call this living ...