Re: What would I do without partimage?
On Sat, 17 Dec 2005 21:11:04 +0200 (MET DST)
Szakacsits Szabolcs <szaka@sienet.hu> wrote:
>
> 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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I've been eager for an answer to a question and i always forget to google about it :)
Is NTFS support safe to use for writing? Are all functions implemented?
If no time to answer could you just please direct me where to look for this information. I know this is constant development, but i would be very interested in trying it out.
Andrei
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