I've actually considered this virtually no-cost solution, just don't know much about bootable plus accessible CD's. I'll have to do some research on that one forthwith. Seems to me there's a way to set that up with Ubuntu or possibly even Red Hat. On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 09:43:25 -0600, you wrote:
I think you can image an ntfs disk with dd and gzip. I used to do that all the time with fat partitions. I haven't tried it with ntfs though. I kind of got out of the habit because linux didn't used to be able to write ntfs partitions. But it worked for fat16 partitions and now that linux can write ntfs, it would probably work for ntfs. The procedure used to be something like this:
1. Boot into linux. If you have a dual boot machine, great. Else use a live CD like oralux or grml. 2. Find enough disk space for the image, if you boot a live CD, you'll have to mount a network drive via nfs or samba. 3. Run dd with the in file being the fat or ntfs partition and out file piped to gzip.
The restore process is the same for steps 1 & 2 but the in file and out file are reversed for step 3.
I'll bet you can even make changes to the image by mounting it on a loopback device. I haven't tried it with ntfs but I've done it with fat16 many times. I'm about as sure as I can be that it would work because I've already mounted ntfs partitions and went in and deleted files.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave" <dave.mehler@gmail.com> To: "'Blind sysadmins list'" <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:50 AM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers
Hello, I'm also interested in this. For me another requirement would be to image several types of machines, Windows and Linux boxes for example. Thanks. Dave.
-----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Steve Matzura Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:00 AM To: blind-sysadmin Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers
I'm the sys admin for a small network--my home network--which has, among other things, five desktops and two laptops running XP SP2. I recently had to rebuild one after something, and I still don't know what that something was, turned most of my machine into just so much cole slaw. It all started with trying to uninstall a trial version of a voice dialer called VoiceIt or something similar. Anyway, the uninstall went bad, and took the rest of the machine with it.
One New Year's resolution I'm deciding is a must-keep is to image all my boot drives in the house and pack 'em away against the day, which will hopefully never come, when I need them. I just took a Dell Dimension 4700 and rolled it back to factory defaults through use of the Dell System Recovery Environment (DSRE), which is a fancy shmancy name for nothing more than a hidden partition with a Ghost image and some batch file control on the front end to automate the process. I had just a wee bit of trouble with it in that somehow something (possibly even the deinstall of VoiceIt) had broken the master boot record for the hidden partition wherein the DSRE is located. Thanks to a gentleman on the net named Dan Goodell, I was able to put Humpty Dumpty together again and with about two minutes help from my self-proclaimed Ludite wife, brought the 4700 back to life. This is Something I wish not to have to repeat. Ever.
What was great about the DSRE was that it worked flawlessly. What was horrible about it was, of course, that it had no speech. So now that the computer's been completely updated and all the software I want on it has been reinstalled and everything's at a nice stable state, it's now time to do the deed and make another image, this one hopefully bootable from a CD and maybe even with some speech and accessible. Mind you, I'm going to have to do this, whatever it is, at least six times, so I'd like whatever I build to be accessible everywhere. I was even thinking really big like get a USB drive and put all the images on it and have a bootable front-end where I select which image I want to restore, and it just goes and does it. What are folks thoughts on how to do this?
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