Re: backing up a new laptop
On Tuesday 03 October 2006 05:18, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> My son just got himself a Lenovo thinkpad with wifi, ethernet, a tablet,
> and Windows XP. For reasons I will not go into here, he wants to make
> sure his Windows XP system remains functional even though he prefers
> Linux, and plans to dual-boot between Windows and Gentoo. (I'm the
> debian user, and this is of concern to me, so it's not *totally*
> off-topic on Debian-user).
>
> There is no CD drive on this system (reduces the weight), but it
> will boot from USB drives.
>
> He should be able to connect to my LAN, which has large NFS-accessible
> storage.
>
> What he wants to do is make a complete backup of his hard disk (possibly
> partition by partition) before he does anything to install any linux,
> makes any real use of windows, and especially before he connects to the
> net using Windows. He's not stupid. There is a Windows rescue
> partition on the disk, but we're not naive enough to believe that it
> will be unaffected by real trouble either.
>
> My question is: what recommendations do you have as to appropriate
> tools for this? Presumably some kind of Linux live CD, but what
> flavour, and what software from the live CD. We also have to be able
> to restore from this backup when the entire machine is hosed, of course.
>
I use a small dedicated linux partition to do this to run backups from.
NTFS partitions I use ntfsclone from the package ntfsprogs. (I have also
used partimage but found the UI awkward). For linux partitions I use dar
or tar.
IIRC these are all available in stable and on Knoppnix.
HTH
Andrew
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