[GLLUG] Hard Disk Imaging

[Adam McDougall]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 09:07:58AM -0500, Clay Dowling wrote:

  I'm looking for a reliable, fast tool for hard disk imaging.  I'm not
  wanting to pay any money.
  
  I have an NTFS drive that I need to re-virgin several times a day while
  testing an install.  I have access to Norton Ghost, but to be honest
  version 10, which I'm using, is a major pain in the tail.  I'm currently
  using g4u off the Ultimate Boot CD, but it takes half an hour to re-virgin
  the disk and that can get old when it's a small tweak that I need to make
  in my install.
  
  I absolutely need the solution to place the images on a network and
  retrieve them from a network, because we don't have a machine with a spare
  hard disk to store the image.  I need it to work reliably with NTFS
  (PartImage comes with gigantic warning signs about NTFS).
  
  Clay
  -- 
  Simple Content Management
  http://www.ceamus.com
  
When I did something similar, I had a small (2G) install on the first partition
and installed FreeBSD on the second partition consuming the rest of the disk.
When I wanted to re-image, I just booted into FreeBSD and used dd to replace 
the first partition, which I had made an image from using dd when I was satisfied
with its initial pristine state.  I did this using one fast HD, but keeping the
images on a seperate HD from the target would improve the transfer speed.  If you
can manage 40MB/sec transfer speed, 2G would take less than a minute to image + 
reboot time.  If you stored it on the network and the network wasn't extremely fast,
it might help to compress the network image and uncompress it on the fly.
You could just as easily keep the image on the network with a network file system
or devise your own way to transfer the image, but im almost all cases a local copy
will be faster.  The key is keeping your image small so you can just copy over it
with a minimum amount of time.  You could also keep a number of variations on hand.

Basically if you keep the image small enough and on a fast medium, you wont have
to worry about the filesystem inside it because you could just deal with raw images.