I've been playing with the latest version of Ghost Solution Suite, and its actually accessible. You install the Ghost Solution Suite Console on a server machine, and it has clients that it pushes out to your workstations. Its looking like 90% of the tasks are actually done using the Ghost Console on the server, and it just sends messages out to the various clients to reboot the machines and do their thing. I've not gotten it perfect yet, there's a Windows PE boot CD that's kind of a last resort thing and that CD seems to want to bring up the old style Ghostcast interface as apposed to connect to the server and be managed centerally, but just yesterday I think I found a way to fix that so that the CD boots and talks to the server. Its not the perfect solution but its better than relying on working eyes 100% of the time. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Greg B. Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:25 AM To: dave.mehler@gmail.com; 'Blind sysadmins list' Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers Dave, I would look at a drive image product such as Drive Image XL or Acronus True Image. I think the drive image product have a verwsion for Linux,and also Dos. Greg B. -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Dave Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 7:50 AM To: 'Blind sysadmins list' 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? _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

Hi, Brent: On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:52:49 -0600, you wrote:

How would something like that ever work for completely reinstalling when that time comes? How could it make any given machine reboot and start reimaging?

Most Linuxes (Linuces?) are so non-machine-specific as to be able to boot a kernel containing enough of the base code to run very basic things. Among those basic things, Linux--most of them, anyway--includes code for reading and writing just about any kind of disk or reading/writing any kind of partition on a disk no matter what its type (FAT, NTFS, etc.). Most popular Linuxes now have speech, some even built-in off the shelf, so you can boot a CD or a USB drive and have the thing come up talking. You then mount the thing you want to restore (or back up) as a file system (which is kind of an odd way of saying it's a disk even if it isn't, if you're not into how Linux handles devices and files) and you do your thing. To Linux, everything's a file, whether it's your keyboard, your monitor, or an NTFS partition on a multi-terabyte RAID array, it's all the same to Linux. Internal to each file system are objects called nodes, which in Windows parlance is akin to a file in a volume table of contents (VTOC). The code that knows, or cares, about whether the so-called file is really a hardware device is known as a device driver. The coupling between all these elements is so tight as to be seamless from end to end. So when you mount a partition on a disk, Linux doesn't much care what it is, as long as you have the tools to manipulate whatever *you* think it should be. In the case of the dd utility, it treats the partition as one big file, reading all the sector data and writing it to a file that, for all intents and purposes, looks just like the data that makes it up, with a little additional data probably at the beginning and end to identify it as a package containing other things. It's a snapshot frozen in time stored in the image file. Whhen you need it again, you simply run dd in the opposite direction and a suitably created partition on some hardware device will contain an exact copy, sector for sector, byte for byte, as the old partition did.

Brent: With Ghost, you can make a Windows PE boot CD that can be used to boot the machine. Normally this is used to launch a manual Ghostcast session. However, if you manipulate the startup scripts, you can have the CD launch the Windows PE version of the console client. This then connects to the server and you can manage it just as if it were running a full version of Windows. I haven't gotten quite to this point yet, but in theory you can make a CD that you boot from and can walk away as the machine will be up on the network and accessible from the Ghost console. The network boot is also an option, the Ghost software comes with its own PXE server just in case you don't have one on your network, but I've not played with that yet. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Brent Harding Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 5:30 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers Ah, should've been a little more clear on what I was asking. I'm sure the linux live Ubuntu CD would probably work just fine, dd'ing my windows partition, but with this ghost thing where you use another machine as a server, how does the other box that I want restored know to do so when I tell the server box I want it done? Is this something that probably wouldn't work on home machines where there is no network boot? It would seem like this would be a better way if possible because just using DD from a linux disk would mean that if I was backing up a 300 gig drive, I have to use 300 gigs on the destination even if it was basically a fresh install of Windows with JFW and the proper drivers on it and ready to go even though there'd be lots of empty space in that file. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Matzura" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 3:37 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

Hi, Brent:

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:52:49 -0600, you wrote:

...

How would something like that ever work for completely reinstalling when that time comes? How could it make any given machine reboot and start reimaging?

Most Linuxes (Linuces?) are so non-machine-specific as to be able to boot a kernel containing enough of the base code to run very basic things. Among those basic things, Linux--most of them, anyway--includes code for reading and writing just about any kind of disk or reading/writing any kind of partition on a disk no matter what its type (FAT, NTFS, etc.). Most popular Linuxes now have speech, some even built-in off the shelf, so you can boot a CD or a USB drive and have the thing come up talking. You then mount the thing you want to restore (or back up) as a file system (which is kind of an odd way of saying it's a disk even if it isn't, if you're not into how Linux handles devices and files) and you do your thing. To Linux, everything's a file, whether it's your keyboard, your monitor, or an NTFS partition on a multi-terabyte RAID array, it's all the same to Linux. Internal to each file system are objects called nodes, which in Windows parlance is akin to a file in a volume table of contents (VTOC). The code that knows, or cares, about whether the so-called file is really a hardware device is known as a device driver. The coupling between all these elements is so tight as to be seamless from end to end. So when you mount a partition on a disk, Linux doesn't much care what it is, as long as you have the tools to manipulate whatever *you* think it should be. In the case of the dd utility, it treats the partition as one big file, reading all the sector data and writing it to a file that, for all intents and purposes, looks just like the data that makes it up, with a little additional data probably at the beginning and end to identify it as a package containing other things. It's a snapshot frozen in time stored in the image file. Whhen you need it again, you simply run dd in the opposite direction and a suitably created partition on some hardware device will contain an exact copy, sector for sector, byte for byte, as the old partition did.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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Ah, I suppose the bios would have to be able to boot from the network. Maybe using one of those Orca-enabled live Ubuntu disks with speech in them might be better, and using good old dd, as long as there was a way to 0 out the free space, which ghost probably does for you on the images it creates. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ryan Shugart" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:40 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

Brent: With Ghost, you can make a Windows PE boot CD that can be used to boot the machine. Normally this is used to launch a manual Ghostcast session. However, if you manipulate the startup scripts, you can have the CD launch the Windows PE version of the console client. This then connects to the server and you can manage it just as if it were running a full version of Windows. I haven't gotten quite to this point yet, but in theory you can make a CD that you boot from and can walk away as the machine will be up on the network and accessible from the Ghost console. The network boot is also an option, the Ghost software comes with its own PXE server just in case you don't have one on your network, but I've not played with that yet. Ryan

-----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Brent Harding Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 5:30 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

Ah, should've been a little more clear on what I was asking. I'm sure the linux live Ubuntu CD would probably work just fine, dd'ing my windows partition, but with this ghost thing where you use another machine as a server, how does the other box that I want restored know to do so when I tell the server box I want it done? Is this something that probably wouldn't work on home machines where there is no network boot? It would seem like this would be a better way if possible because just using DD from a linux disk would mean that if I was backing up a 300 gig drive, I have to use 300 gigs on the destination even if it was basically a fresh install of Windows with JFW and the proper drivers on it and ready to go even though there'd be lots of empty space in that file.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Matzura" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 3:37 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

...

Hi, Brent:

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:52:49 -0600, you wrote:

...

How would something like that ever work for completely reinstalling when that time comes? How could it make any given machine reboot and start reimaging?

Most Linuxes (Linuces?) are so non-machine-specific as to be able to boot a kernel containing enough of the base code to run very basic things. Among those basic things, Linux--most of them, anyway--includes code for reading and writing just about any kind of disk or reading/writing any kind of partition on a disk no matter what its type (FAT, NTFS, etc.). Most popular Linuxes now have speech, some even built-in off the shelf, so you can boot a CD or a USB drive and have the thing come up talking. You then mount the thing you want to restore (or back up) as a file system (which is kind of an odd way of saying it's a disk even if it isn't, if you're not into how Linux handles devices and files) and you do your thing. To Linux, everything's a file, whether it's your keyboard, your monitor, or an NTFS partition on a multi-terabyte RAID array, it's all the same to Linux. Internal to each file system are objects called nodes, which in Windows parlance is akin to a file in a volume table of contents (VTOC). The code that knows, or cares, about whether the so-called file is really a hardware device is known as a device driver. The coupling between all these elements is so tight as to be seamless from end to end. So when you mount a partition on a disk, Linux doesn't much care what it is, as long as you have the tools to manipulate whatever *you* think it should be. In the case of the dd utility, it treats the partition as one big file, reading all the sector data and writing it to a file that, for all intents and purposes, looks just like the data that makes it up, with a little additional data probably at the beginning and end to identify it as a package containing other things. It's a snapshot frozen in time stored in the image file. Whhen you need it again, you simply run dd in the opposite direction and a suitably created partition on some hardware device will contain an exact copy, sector for sector, byte for byte, as the old partition did.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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I know Ghost does do compression but I don't know how that's done. Actually, you can select either no compression, fast compression or high compression so its probably got several different algorithms it uses. However, you are right even when you select the high compression option be prepared for some large images. We recently allocated 200GB on our san just for ghost images. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of John G. Heim Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:52 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers Hmmmm... Are you figuring ghost is analysing the file system so that it doesn't include empty disk space in the image? Maybe. I wouldn't count on it though. I think it's more llikely that ghost compresses the image as it's being created. I am not the Windows guy in my department and I don't have any experience with ghost. But I do know those ghost images are not that small. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brent Harding" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:29 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

Ah, should've been a little more clear on what I was asking. I'm sure the linux live Ubuntu CD would probably work just fine, dd'ing my windows partition, but with this ghost thing where you use another machine as a server, how does the other box that I want restored know to do so when I tell the server box I want it done? Is this something that probably wouldn't work on home machines where there is no network boot? It would seem like this would be a better way if possible because just using DD from a linux disk would mean that if I was backing up a 300 gig drive, I have to use 300 gigs on the destination even if it was basically a fresh install of Windows with JFW and the proper drivers on it and ready to go even though there'd be lots of empty space in that file.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Matzura" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 3:37 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

...

Hi, Brent:

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:52:49 -0600, you wrote:

...

How would something like that ever work for completely reinstalling when that time comes? How could it make any given machine reboot and start reimaging?

Most Linuxes (Linuces?) are so non-machine-specific as to be able to boot a kernel containing enough of the base code to run very basic things. Among those basic things, Linux--most of them, anyway--includes code for reading and writing just about any kind of disk or reading/writing any kind of partition on a disk no matter what its type (FAT, NTFS, etc.). Most popular Linuxes now have speech, some even built-in off the shelf, so you can boot a CD or a USB drive and have the thing come up talking. You then mount the thing you want to restore (or back up) as a file system (which is kind of an odd way of saying it's a disk even if it isn't, if you're not into how Linux handles devices and files) and you do your thing. To Linux, everything's a file, whether it's your keyboard, your monitor, or an NTFS partition on a multi-terabyte RAID array, it's all the same to Linux. Internal to each file system are objects called nodes, which in Windows parlance is akin to a file in a volume table of contents (VTOC). The code that knows, or cares, about whether the so-called file is really a hardware device is known as a device driver. The coupling between all these elements is so tight as to be seamless from end to end. So when you mount a partition on a disk, Linux doesn't much care what it is, as long as you have the tools to manipulate whatever *you* think it should be. In the case of the dd utility, it treats the partition as one big file, reading all the sector data and writing it to a file that, for all intents and purposes, looks just like the data that makes it up, with a little additional data probably at the beginning and end to identify it as a package containing other things. It's a snapshot frozen in time stored in the image file. Whhen you need it again, you simply run dd in the opposite direction and a suitably created partition on some hardware device will contain an exact copy, sector for sector, byte for byte, as the old partition did.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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I know Ghost does do compression but I don't know how that's done. Actually, you can select either no compression, fast compression or high compression so its probably got several different algorithms it uses. However, you are right even when you select the high compression option be prepared for some large images. We recently allocated 200GB on our san just for ghost images. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of John G. Heim Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:52 PM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers Hmmmm... Are you figuring ghost is analysing the file system so that it doesn't include empty disk space in the image? Maybe. I wouldn't count on it though. I think it's more llikely that ghost compresses the image as it's being created. I am not the Windows guy in my department and I don't have any experience with ghost. But I do know those ghost images are not that small. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brent Harding" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 6:29 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

Ah, should've been a little more clear on what I was asking. I'm sure the linux live Ubuntu CD would probably work just fine, dd'ing my windows partition, but with this ghost thing where you use another machine as a server, how does the other box that I want restored know to do so when I tell the server box I want it done? Is this something that probably wouldn't work on home machines where there is no network boot? It would seem like this would be a better way if possible because just using DD from a linux disk would mean that if I was backing up a 300 gig drive, I have to use 300 gigs on the destination even if it was basically a fresh install of Windows with JFW and the proper drivers on it and ready to go even though there'd be lots of empty space in that file.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Matzura" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 3:37 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

...

Hi, Brent:

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:52:49 -0600, you wrote:

...

How would something like that ever work for completely reinstalling when that time comes? How could it make any given machine reboot and start reimaging?

Most Linuxes (Linuces?) are so non-machine-specific as to be able to boot a kernel containing enough of the base code to run very basic things. Among those basic things, Linux--most of them, anyway--includes code for reading and writing just about any kind of disk or reading/writing any kind of partition on a disk no matter what its type (FAT, NTFS, etc.). Most popular Linuxes now have speech, some even built-in off the shelf, so you can boot a CD or a USB drive and have the thing come up talking. You then mount the thing you want to restore (or back up) as a file system (which is kind of an odd way of saying it's a disk even if it isn't, if you're not into how Linux handles devices and files) and you do your thing. To Linux, everything's a file, whether it's your keyboard, your monitor, or an NTFS partition on a multi-terabyte RAID array, it's all the same to Linux. Internal to each file system are objects called nodes, which in Windows parlance is akin to a file in a volume table of contents (VTOC). The code that knows, or cares, about whether the so-called file is really a hardware device is known as a device driver. The coupling between all these elements is so tight as to be seamless from end to end. So when you mount a partition on a disk, Linux doesn't much care what it is, as long as you have the tools to manipulate whatever *you* think it should be. In the case of the dd utility, it treats the partition as one big file, reading all the sector data and writing it to a file that, for all intents and purposes, looks just like the data that makes it up, with a little additional data probably at the beginning and end to identify it as a package containing other things. It's a snapshot frozen in time stored in the image file. Whhen you need it again, you simply run dd in the opposite direction and a suitably created partition on some hardware device will contain an exact copy, sector for sector, byte for byte, as the old partition did.

_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins

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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" To: "'Blind sysadmins list'" 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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Well, since linux reads the raw device as if it were a single file, it doesn't care what it is, it'd store it to a file and be able to put it back on the drive at a minimum. A talking live Ubuntu disk with Orca on should do this, but if you have 300 gig drives, will gzip compress out the empty space so you don't have to have a 300 gig image for a drive that may only have 40 or 50 gigs on it? ----- Original Message ----- From: "John G. Heim" To: ; "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 9:43 AM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

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" To: "'Blind sysadmins list'" 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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I suppose, normally, if it was a fresh drive, the empty part would be all 0, but in reality, what free space is will probably contain old data that was already deleted. Wouldn't defrag 0 out the free space so that when I'd use dd to image the drive and compress it that I wouldn't be needlessly keeping deleted stuff? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Matzura" To: "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 4:09 PM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

I hope the following explanation goes some way toward answering your question. I also hope that it's not so horribly boring that old hands at this ask me why I am restating what some folks think we all should know in our sleep.

The short answer is, yes, you can run the output from dd through a compresser like gzip (GNU ZIP). The long answer is, depending on what and how much you've backed up into the original image file, the compressed file may not be that much smaller. Archives and compressed multimedia files like MP3 are famous for not getting that much out of being re-compressed, so if you're backing up a partition that has lots of those kinds of files, you won't get that much compression, if any at all. OTOH, if your partition contains large portions of unused space, if that space contains nulls (or any other repeating character) the compression could be quite high and good. The problem is, if your partition has ever gotten full and then you cleaned up, you do know that your old files' data is still there, you've just lost the pointers to it, so because we're talking about an image backup here, not a file backup, the compressed image size could be adversely affected. This is where the trade-off between speed and efficiency comes into play. I could make a file backup that could conceivably be quite small compared to the actual partition size in which the source files originally resided, then make another kind of backup that would simply copy the rules of the partition mapping--how many tracks, cylinders, sectors, whatever, are in each partition and where each partition on the physical disk begins, that kind of thing is minuscule in size. In real life, though, we don't do that, we just launch a program that will create the partition we want to the size spec we want and then we restore the files. The problem with this approach is efficiency. It takes far longer to write individual files than it does to just lay down a solid stream of data from one end of the partition to the other because for every new file added to the partition, it takes two different kinds of disk accesses--one to query, then update, the master file allocation table and/or volume table of contents, and then another to actually go out there and lay down the restored files. Thankfully, though, improvements in hardware technology have brought this speed differential down to a manageable level. I distinctly remember years ago where full image backups on my DEC PDP-11 at work using 175-megabyte drives (RP06's for those who go back that far) took exactly 30 minutes, but a file backup after the disk was suitably prepared (read "initialized") could run all day.

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 13:55:01 -0600, you wrote:

...

Well, since linux reads the raw device as if it were a single file, it doesn't care what it is, it'd store it to a file and be able to put it back on the drive at a minimum. A talking live Ubuntu disk with Orca on should do this, but if you have 300 gig drives, will gzip compress out the empty space so you don't have to have a 300 gig image for a drive that may only have 40 or 50 gigs on it?

----- Original Message ----- From: "John G. Heim" To: ; "Blind sysadmins list" Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 9:43 AM Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers

...

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" To: "'Blind sysadmins list'" 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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