My wife has a dual boot laptop with Windows XP and Debian Sid. Recently
it had to be send for repairs and I am in the process of reinstalling
everything.
Since I do not have Norton Ghost, I am going to try using Linux tools to
install Windows XP on an NTFS partition and image it for future
installations.
Here is my plan:
1) Format the C: partition during installation of Win XP Home with SP1
2) After installation of Windows XP SP1, install SP2.
3) Install all other necessary program: anti-spyware, ghostscript, gv,
acroread, ghost (word to PDF convertor), gaim, ifranview, etc.
4) At this point I will have the installation of WinXP Sp2 and all
necessary software. But during all this activity, the disk would be full
of erased files. So defrag it now. Do the defragmentatino twice or even
thrice.
5) To further help gzip later on, boot into windows and run a small
program I made that just open a new file and keeps on writing 0x00 to it
till the disk is full. When the disk is full, stop writing to it and
erase that file. Now all the random data on the C: partition would be
all zeros. Good for gzip! Note: I can't just boot with a live CD and do:
$> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1/zero.bin
till disk is full since writing to NTFS from Linux is not advisable(hda1
is C: here).
6) Boot using either system rescue CD (http://sysresccd.org/) or Knoppix.
7) copy the image of the C: (hda1) drive to a separate parition I
already have(/dev/hda2):
$> mkdir image-disk
$> mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 image-disk
$> dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip > /image-disk/c-image.img
and then I burn that c-image.img to a DVD.
To restore the image at a later stage, assuming the size of /dev/hda1
has not changed, I just do:
$> boot using a Live CD
$> mkdir image-disk
$> mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 image-disk
$> cat image-disk/c-image.img | gunzip -c | of=/dev/hda1
where I have copied the c-image.img from a backup DVD to that /dev/hda2
partition.
Comments?
Q. How long should I expect step (7) above to take if /dev/hda1 is 14GB?
The laptop is Dell Inspiron 5160 with 512MB of ram. I know that using
bzip2 will be quite longer than using gzip.
Q. If somebody has tried this option, how much compression ratio should
I expect?
Q. Alternatives?
Thanks,
->HS