Re: What would I do without partimage?
nospam-51121@carolina.rr.com (William Ballard) writes:
> You can't mount a [ntfsclone] image that has been saved with
> --save-image.
If you want a compressed and mountable image then use ntfsclone without the
--save-image option and with a compressed filesystem.
> I tried ntfsclone and it works about as fast as partimage, and it's
> definitely less cumbersome that partimage; however the resulting gzipped
> image file from a 20GB partition with 2GB of actual data was about 60MB
> larger: 840mb versus 780mb. The partimage image was also gzipped.
Two possible explanations:
1) Both patimage and ntfsclone save the used blocks based on the block
allocation bitmap, however partimage doesn't have consistency check while
ntfsclone has. This means if your ntfs is inconsistent (which is
unfortunately more common than most people would like it) then partimage
will save less data than needed and obviously you will lose those.
2) partimage used a higher compression option than the one was used with
ntfsclone, which could be basically anything given that one can have the
image in a pipe stream.
> I'm also going to file a bug against ntfsprogs that ntfsclone should be
> packaged separately from the rest of ntfsprogs. ntfsclone is actually
> useful; the rest of those programs are either unnecessary or flat
> dangerous.
They are much less dangerous than cp, tar, partimage, parted, etc. Over the
last three years there wasn't even one report about damaged ntfs (using our
code) even if they are pretty widely used (directly or indirectly over a
million users).
Actually due to their reliability, several serious problems were discovered
at least in the previously mentioned utilities: tar trashes any 4+ GB
sparse files for over a year when the --sparse option is used, parted
sometimes still corrupts partition tables with head number 240, etc.
> The fact that ntfsclone is packaged with a tool called "fixntfs"
Ntfsfix currently is distributed to fix corrupted NTFS which were corrupted
by the Windows NTFS driver, not by the new Linux NTFS code.
Originally ntfsfix was developed by the new Linux NTFS developers to "fix"
corrupted NTFS which were corrupted by the NT4 NTFS kernel driver 5 years
ago and which driver was developed then abandoned by their developers. That
driver is not used for years now and write was disabled 3-4 years ago.
> or somethign who's man page says "always run this after running any of
> the other utilities in this package before booting or your NTFS partition
> will be completely destroyed"
This was NEVER in the ntfsfix manual page, your claim is absolutely untrue.
I wrote ntfsresize, ntfsclone, worked on ntfsfix and I've never released
non-stable code. Here is the ntfsfix manual which has nothing even close to
what you're saying:
http://wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=man:ntfsfix
As a matter of fact, I was who rewrote the "5 years old" ntfsfix manual
this year
http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/linux-ntfs/ntfsprogs/ntfsprogs/ntfsfix.8.in?r1=1.5&r2=1.6
because it still referred to the old, dead NTFS kernel driver which was
never developed, maintained and supported by the new NTFS developers and
which had write disabled in the last 3-4 years.
All the utils in ntfsprogs and the current kernel code was written from
scratch to also support W2K, XP, W2K3, Vista and nothing is shared with the
old, broken and experimantal NT4 NTFS driver.
> makes me feel squeamish about ntfsclone, although as I said it's a
> different animal and people report it as stable.
Yes and that's not by accident but due to a lot of very careful work. It
was supposed to be always stable since I publicly released it, almost three
years ago. Ntfsclone is intensively used and also crucial during
development and regression testing.
Szaka
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