Clone (dd) winXP using Linux LIVECD?

jaqian

Is it possible to clone my winXP partition from the command line in a Linux LiveCD distro and save it as an image on an external hard drive?

I'm going to be installing Linspire (alongside windows) soon on my laptop and I want to back up my winXP partition in case there are any problems. How do I go about this? I've heard about the "dd" command but not sure how it works etc.

niallb

dd will do it if you have the room.
A live cd called G4L might give
you a nicer environment. It's menu driven for just this task.

The version I downloaded had a minor bug in setting the image name
if you wanted to transfer via ftp to another machine.
It was easily sorted, so if that's where you're going with it,
let me know and I'll post the workaround.

NiallB

jaqian

I have plenty space with a 180Gb external hard drive, as long as it'll be able to use them. Thanks Niall I'll check that out.

deimos

There is a program on the feather bootable linux cd called "partimage". It's probably also in knoppix, nice and clean interface for backing up and making disk images.

Capt'n Midnight

I'll second partimage, it compresses as well and ignores free space so the image will be smaller than dd. It's on the knoppix CD as is ntfsresize. one trick is to shrink C: then in XP create as FAT32 and then dump the image to it.

one tiny problem with dd is that you can't restore to a hdd with different geometry and get away with it all the time.

I'd still recomend using NtBackup in windows to backup the root and system state and windows folder - if using XP home it's on the CD as ntbackup.msi - note: ntbackup does not compress and can only be restored in windows.

G4U is also worth a look

Syth

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

one tiny problem with dd is that you can't restore to a hdd with different geometry and get away with it all the time.

dd will do what you want, but as Capt'n Midnight said, the new partition will have to be same size.

As far as I know, Linux can read an NTFS filesystem, so you could mount the partition in read-only mode and then make an archive of the filesystem on the portable. I've never done this, so I don't know if you'd be able to restore from that archive, some NTFS information might have been lost. Doing that is a higher level than using dd, and you wouldn't have to worry about partition sizes, which is a plus.

A recommendation for dd. Tell dd to use a high block size (bs) like 1,000,000. In my experience the dd is much faster.

For example:

[din][~]$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=1000000 bs=1
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1000000 bytes transferred in 4.243439 secs (235658 bytes/sec)

real    0m4.259s
user    0m0.944s
sys     0m2.906s
[din][~]$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null count=1 bs=1000000
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1000000 bytes transferred in 0.006258 secs (159795184 bytes/sec)

real    0m0.028s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.010s

jaqian

I thought I could use something like resizefs to get the image to fill a bigger drive.

niallb

You can.

NutJob

Syth wrote:

dd will do what you want, but as Capt'n Midnight said, the new partition will have to be same size.




also physically bad disks fail

not that im suggesing you have a bad drive :-)


partimage is part of the debian distro "may" be in dsl

Capt'n Midnight

NutJob wrote:

also physically bad disks fail

not that im suggesing you have a bad drive :-)

partimage is part of the debian distro "may" be in dsl

You can tell it to ignore bad blocks, ghost can also be told to ignore band blocks.. and both can still fail to make a decent image

Partimage will restore to the same size or bigger partition, ntfsresize can shrink down before imaging, but not the best option if you suspect bad blocks