PartImage http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page
System Rescue CD http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
Gparted http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
I wanted to get this down before I completely forgot it.
I just recently upgrade my PC to a Dual Core AMD X 2 64bit processor, new motherboard, memory, and case. I then needed to reuse my old DVD and Hard Drives. The problem was that I, for some reason, couldn't use my ATA drive as the boot drive. Also the 120 gig IDE drive that I had was not working for some reason and I couldn't just format it because of the data I had on it. I think this was a windows issue. So I ended up pulling an old 80gig hard drive out of the boxes that I had it stored in and used that as my boot drive. I managed to install thinkg were good, but for one thing. The drive sounded like a dryer with rocks in it. That wasn't good. so I started down the path of figuring out how to "clone" this 80gig drive to my 120 gig drive without having to reinstall everything.
I did some searching and found PartImage. A nice tool that you can use to backup or "clone" you drive and then reinstall it. As I was reading I found this tool was installed on a linux based "System Rescue CD". I downloaded the ISO ran it and start my trial and error of using this tool. I won't go through all the details because there is a far amount of documentation already on it but I will outline some of the main items that I had issues with and resolved for this work.
The Process
1) I first had to backup the current 80gig drive with partimage.
a) To perform this work I needed to mount the 300 gig ATA drive. to do this I followed this process. Because these are NTFS drives I need to use NTFS-3g to gain full RW access to the drives.
i) Create a directory to mount the ATA drive too: mkdir /mnt/backup
ii) Mount the ATA drive: NTFS-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/backup
iii) Now if you run DIR or LS on /mnt/backup you should see the root to the drive you jsut mounted
b) To find out what drive you want to mount to copy your data to you can run gparted and this will scan you system for drive and show you what drive the OS recognized.
c) In a terminal window type partimage. This will start the partimage tool to backup your partition.
2) Once you are the partimage screen, I am only going to point out the main items that I had an issue with, it is really obvious but took me hours to figure out.
3) In partimage, choose the partition that you want to backup by highlighting it.
4) Enter the name of the file you want the image to be saved too. You will need to save it to the mounted drive you created earlier. (/mnt/backup/[dir]/backup.gz)
5) When you choose the compression you have an option to choose the application to break it into small sizes. YOU WILL WANT TO DO THIS. This is the biggest issue I had. I created one file, and used the default of 2gig and when I went to restore the image it failed. I banged my head against the wall on this for days. I finally found the answer on a form. Change the size of the compressed files to 650meg. I made this change and backup up 40gigs of data and restored it to the 120gig drive with no problems.
6) Hit F5 for next, enter the description and run it.
7) After the backup is completed I removed the 80gig drive, installed the 120 gig drive and ran through step one to map the drive.
8) Now I ran Gparted to reparation and format the 120gig drive. I also used this tool to make this drive bootable. (what a great tool)
9) I then ran partimage, choose the drive to restore to, and put in the file name of the image that I created earlier.
10) The restore took 30min.
11) I closed the application, pulled out the Cd and rebooted the system.
12) The Os came up with no problems and everything was the way it was with the other drive.
I am very happy with these tools. It made my life easier in the end, since I didn’t have to reinstall everything all over again, which is a pain in the ars. Keep in mind, I restored an image on the same hardware that the image came from. Issues with SID’s and hardware compatibility were not there. Also, NTFS support is experimental for these tools, but I experienced no problems with anything. The only problem was the size of the image and this was easily resolved by breaking them into smaller pieces.
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