[Cialug] Drive Imaging.

[Don Cady]

I won't attest to the quality of any of these projects, but know they exist 
so I'm passing this list (hey, it's something..) along:

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
http://partitionlogic.org.uk/

Don

> 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