Re: Need comments on my 'Parted as Norton ghost replacement'

[Andrew Clausen]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 05:52:23PM -0000, andreas t wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am using dd and parted as a replacement for norton ghost with what 
> appears to be success. however I thought I'd check with you if 
> something is wrong or if you think I may encounter any obvious 
> problems down the road from doing things this way;
> 
> I start with a machine (master machine) running a clean install of 
> win98 on a fat32 partition.
> 
> 1)  I defrag it from within windows to move all data to the beginning 
> of the disk. Let us say the partition is 2 GB and the data on the 
> partition is 300 MB.
>     
> 2) I boot my custom Linux boot floppy on the same machine and use 
> (for example) "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/imagefile.raw bs=1M count=310" 
> to make an image of the actual data (with the 10MB extra just in 
> case). I burn my image on a cd-r.

A better strategy (which will get rid of that warning later on, etc.)
is to use Parted to copy... it can resize as it copies ;)

        # dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/imagefile.raw bs=1M count=310
        # parted /mnt/imagefile.raw
        (parted) mklabel loop
        (parted) mkpart primary fat 0 309.9
        (parted) cp /dev/hda 1 1

This is mentioned in the Parted manual, in section 8.

> 5) Now there is a problem. The fat32 file system on my new partition 
> thinks that the partition is 2 GB (from the original geometry). I 
> start parted which alerts me th
> at the file system and the partition table doesn't agree. I use 
> "print" in parted to get the partition geometry, then I use parted to 
> resize my partition to the exact same values reported by the "print" 
> command. This doesn't seem to resize anything since I resize to the 
> same size, but the funny thing is that the file system's info about 
> the partition geometry is synced to my actual partition geometry 
> making Win98 think that the partition is 800 MB as it should.

That is by design, yes ;)

> 6) The end. Everything seems to work. I have used this method on a 
> few well used computers at work and I have not experienced any 
> problems. However I am not very into file systems and I do not want 
> to run into troubles down the road from this. Do you see any problems 
> doing what I do here?

The only problem I can think of, is if defrag decides not to move some
stuff...

Andrew