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Ghost is not quite the same as backing up data. There was two people in the drive imaging game, until Symantec bought PowerQuest last year. They basicilly bought it and did absolutely nothing with it other then modify some web pages to point to a Symantec website. Click on the Drive Image 7 link and see.

For the least painless install possible, try MandrakeLinux. It also is very stable once set up. However, it does many things for the user (eg, partitions), so may find you'd like to be more hands-on. SuSE is a good distro to start on too, as it also has a pretty painless install.

Also, if you plan to dual-boot (Linux/Windows), PartitionMagic is a must.

So where does PowerQuest fit in?

they normally only offer a complete wipe or split-in-two, but still need to reinstall your alternate OS

About the only "proprietary" software I use rather frequently, and on Windows.
PowerQuest Partition Magic, allows resizing and moving of existing partitions without damaging the contents. Allows you to make room for Linux without breaking Windows. I always first repartition the drive from Windows with it, then boot Linux installer and skip repartitioning, just format and mount Linux partitions. Unless of course it's a dedicated Linux box :)

Does anyone know of some similar software for Linux? Mandrake people supposedly developed something alike, but with broken NTFS support in the kernel, I doubt it could work.

Put briefly, when you make a win2k image somehow root is not given access to the swapfile. Win2k will not work without a swapfile and will not start the shell unless it has one. But, you cannot point it to the swapfile or create a new one until you get into the shell.

You have two choices. One is to use M$ sysprep tool as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. An easier method that I have found is to force win2k to delete the swap file on exit using the instructions found in the PowerQuest Knowledge Base

After making this change, reboot and create a copy of the partition. The copied partition will now be bootable.

I have not worked much with WinXP so I am not sure what the problems inherent to it are, but this method works with win2k.

Here at work, we use Power Quest Drive image

I have yet to have a problem with it, and ironically enough, i just re-imaged my workstation with it in a couple of minutes across the network before seeing this article. We can save disk images to the network, and pull them across that way, or simply put them on cd(s).

Check out this PowerQuest Partition Magic update page :)

Go buy a copy of Partition Magic. Resize the C drive down, then install Linux. How easy could this get?

Fork out $70 for PartitionMagic, which can handle NTFS (which I assume is the default file system there). But hey, it's less than XP!

I saw a TC1000 in a store, and totally fell in love with the physical design: it's a tablet and a laptop with an oversized swivel screen. But I was put off by the Crusoe processor. I had a Sony sub-laptop that used it, and there was a nasty delay starting new apps. Didn't seem very economical of power either, though maybe you can blame that on Sony featuritis.

I can Ghost an 80 gig drive in under 10 minutes. There are other commercial products.

I have far too many other projects that could use 6-7 hours...

//cow

I wouldn't quite say that. NTFS might be proprietary, but progs like Partition Magic have been able to partition the mystical NTFS. Though the price does shy away many a person. Personally, I'd rather use a second HDD to dual boot anyway, that way if one disk fails, I still have the other operating system.

1)ISO Buster to restore corrupted CD's. Isobuster

3)Restore lost data on hard disks Google and Download.com

However, Microsoft's EULA prevents a user from doing this, even if they have 20 copies of Windows.

Surely this isn't correct... is it?

I'm afraid it is, but companies/schools/everyone ignores this all the time with products like Norton Ghost or PQDI.

With NT4 and 2K Ghost Walker (or some other tool) was also required to make sure your cloned machines had different sids (I'm not sure if that is still true with XP).

At every company I've ever worked all desktop windows boxes are made from one of these cloning programs, so it can't be that illegal, right :)

Where it is a bitch, AND I CURSE MICROSOFT AND WISH THEM ETERNAL DAMNATION FOR THIS, is that the first time 2000 even sees and NTFS 4 partition, it updates it to NTFS 5 WITHOUT TELLING YOU and NT 4 can no longer write to it. They warn you that 2000 will do this during the install, but the assholes do not mention that it will do it after installation when you simply look at an NTFS 4 partition.

Win2K Server and Professional are indeed slightly different animals. A single image of Pro can be replicated out to multiple machines, and once the computer name and IP are changed they will behave nicely together on a LAN. Server won't. Several companies (Powerquest and Altiris) have solutions for this problem.

As far as why you had problems with just replacing a CPU? Who knows? I've worked in a lab with +1500 machines which were constantly reimaged with 95, 98, 2K, Netware and Linux without a hitch. The secret was identical hardware. Hardware (NICs, VidCards, drives, etc) would go bad and we would try to replace them with the same component. This was not always possible, for whatever reason. In my experience, most of those OSes could easily deal with anything except a MB change. VidCard changes were not good either, but as long as the OS included support for the new card, it usually worked out without problem.

Obviously, your mileage has varied.

Also I like the idea that I can read the drive with an ext2 driver from an older kernel or from FreeBSD just in case. In case of what? I don't know, but somehow it makes me feel better.

...How about in case you want to make a disk image with a tool like DriveImage that supports ext2, and therefore, in a round-about way, ext3?
Hard disk crash? no problem -- drop in a new drive and the cd with your partition image and you're up in 15 minutes.
Note: I'm not affliated with PowerQuest -- I just buy their software when I've got money left over from buying a book of the new 37 cent US first class stamps...

I'm currently backing up about 12GB under Win2K using an Onstream 15/30GB tape drive. They sell a 25/50 model as well, but neither they nor anyone else sells anything bigger than that, for a price that a home user would find reasonable. The IDE version of the 15/30 model goes for about $200, and tapes are about $30-$35 each (I have three and cycle between them). Add a couple of hundred dollars for the 25/50 model, or for a SCSI model.

Given those prices, I've got a different plan for when I outgrow my tape drive. I'm thinking about just buying 3 hard drives (whatever I can get for $100 each; right now that's 40GB), a copy of DriveImage, and a removable drive bay (with three drive enclosures, one for each hard drive). When I want to back up my system, I'll pop in a hard drive, use DriveImage to make an image of my system and store it on the removable hard drive. Like with my tapes now, I'll cycle through the three hard drives.

That strategy will probably cost me about $400, which is less expensive than an Onstream 25/50 (plus three tapes). It will also hold more data than the Onstream, and will be substantially faster as well.

When I get one, which I will. Just before I replace the 40hr hard drive with a bigger one, I will be backing up the drive with "Partition Image" http://freshmeat.net/projects/partimage/ or Powerquest's "Drive Image" http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/. That way I can migrate the OS to the new hard drive AND have a backup in case a "upgrade" comes down the line in the future, that removes a feature.

http://www.powerquest.com/easyrestore/

There are several such tools available under Windows. I usually use Partition Magic to non-destructively resize partitions prior to setting up a dual-boot system.

If I had to recommend a tool for MS types to work with foreign partitions, it would have to be Partiton Magic 4. The floppy-disk version of it (tagged as a "rescue disk") is probably the most useful tool one can have if you want to mess around with partitions but you're not hardcore.