[GLLUG] Hard Disk Imaging

Sean O'Malley picasso at madflower.com
Thu Dec 21 19:52:59 EST 2006


I second the Virtualization. I -have- taken a dd image of windows and got
it to run under VPC on the mac a long while ago. I have never tried to
write that disk back though. =)

It is a ram hog but it is really neat to just delete images you screwed up
and start fresh. =)

The other option is cpio or tar, I just don't know if those work on NTFS
or not. It skips the drive formatting so you have to format the drive,
then lay the files down then reset the bootloader. The big advantage to me
is not having to worry about partitioning and formatting especially
resizing or different drive sizes because you are just copying files back
on freshly formatted drives. IF that works then you could use
Virtualization for development and then when your final image was done,
you could use that to copy the VPC drive, and then write it once to disk.
=)

It is slick as hell on Solaris using Jumpstart and I have used similar
with Linux (but not automated, beyond a couple of scripts i wrote to
actually partition using sfdisk, and to format the drives.) I have no idea
how well it would work with NTFS though.




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