[Cialug] Drive Imaging.

[Brandon Griffis]

Just wondering what people out there use for creating hard disk images?  I'm
looking to take an image of a locally connected (USB) hard drive including
the MBR that's formatted as FAT16.  (it's running DOS 6.2)

Many years ago I used Ghost, but it seems that the newer versions of Ghost
require the backup go across a network connection (there is no option to
create an image of a locally connected HD, I even asked Symantec support
about it).

I've come across PartImage for Linux that supports all the major FS formats,
but it only takes an image of a partition, there's no way to simply image
the entire drive.  It also has an option in the program that says "Restore
an MBR from the imagefile", but there is no discussion about that option in
the documentation or much anywhere I could find online.  Everything I could
find about PartImage seemed to claim that you had to use dd and sfdisk to
get the MBR and partition info in addition to getting the image from
PartImage.  Having to use three programs seems a bit overkill to me for
simply wanting to get a drive image backed up.

dd would do the job, but the HD is 32GB and I know dd will read every bit
(not just the used ones) so it would take a very long time and take up a lot
of space when the OS and program on the drive only uses a few hundred meg.

If anybody has experience with PartImage and can verify the "Restore an MBR
from the imagefile" option works, or if anybody knows of another free drive
image utility I would greatly appreciate hearing about it.

Thanks,
Gamble
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