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Using USB Hard Drives For Disk Images?
anomaly asks: "I work for a fairly large company, and we're faced with the problem
of maintaining images of hard disks for the hardware we use in our environment. We use Norton's Ghost for this process. We'd like to use a USB hard disk (because both the desktops and notebooks have USB interfaces) to store hard disk images, but Ghost requires DOS drivers in order to work. Does anyone know of a way that we could store, edit, and organize hard disk images as well as potentially installing the disk image via USB, or over a network? I suppose ideally we'd have some reliable, cheap network attached storage device (preferably in the $200-$500 range) - reliable in that we want to do 0 maintenance on these babies - so that many different hardware images could be stored and reinstalled as necessary. Any ideas?"
Hi,
/. community excuse me, I'm going to talk about solutions that I know of, using Microsoft-based OS's.
.db file to store the users input then creates the .ini file from the .db).
May the
Multicasting :
You could create DOS boot disks with network drivers and TCP/IP then launch Ghost and do multicasting from a Ghost server which stores the images.
Ghost server runs on NT, I don't know if there are other versions available. Basically you tell it what image file to use and a few parameters (session name, number of clients...).
There you have your network attached device which stores the images. The hard part of it is getting boot disks that work with the NIC's you may have. This can be troublesome with laptops. Either have one disk for each NIC, or tweak and do a little programming to allow a selection during the boot process (I got one such disk that Does 3Com 5x9 and 9x5).
The same applies for IP addressing : you could have a disk that asks you the IP address and subnet you want to work with (Again, I got a disk that does that, it uses a
The most important benefit of this multicasting thing : network bandwidth is not wasted sending the same data many time over the network... You can Duplicate a disk on n machines at the same time with only one multicasting session.
Another solution is to create a boot disk with TCP/IP or another NetBIOS enabled protocol (NetBEUI or IPX/SPX) and connect to a network share on a NetBIOS server (could well be a Linux/Samba box), on which you have your images. Down side : each copy requires the data to be sent from the server to the station, thus using a lot of bandwidth.
As for USB, I have no idea how to configure these things under DOS...
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Katchina'404 explanation was very good I'd just like to add a couple of things. CATC has drivers for usb under dos http://www.catc.com/products/usb4dos.html Probably costs a hefty penny and I doubt will fit on a normal floppy. And for the network bootdisks as mentioned before http://www.bootdisk.com has a variety of network bootdisks. Most of them use Microsoft Lanman for DOS.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. At only $15-20 extra per machine, you should be buying systems with SCSI cards. After that, you can plug in external SCSI devices, like hard drives, that are 20x faster than USB with full DOS/real-mode compatibility.
For more information, see this previous /. thread on USB hard drives (and just how freak'n slow they are). Look for my post in the middle (search for SCSI).
Otherwise, does anyone know if IEEE1394 FireWire cards have ASPI/real-mode drivers? If so, that might be another good option. But since most PCs still do not come with FireWire, and FireWire cards are more expensive than SCSI (and the drives aren't much cheaper, although Maxtor is trying to change that), it may not be better.
Either way, avoid USB since it is a slow pig. SCSI or FireWire is a much, much better angle that is 20x faster!
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
We burn the images to bootable CD's or we have a bootable CD that pulls the image across the network. We tried using the external drives but found that it wasn't as convienient or as fast as carrying a couple of CD's around. Besides, we always have our CD cases with us.
We use DOS network boot disks with scripts which automatically set the IP and then do a simple "net use X: \\server-name\sharename". The X: drive shows up in a list of drives in Ghost; all the stuff gets imaged right to the network drive. Don't even need a Ghost server.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Secondly, the TekRam DC-315U is a measly $15-20, does UltraSCSI (20MBps) and interfaces nicely to just about any old/new hard drive. It is completely supported by just about any OS (TekRam even has Linux and BSD drivers -- including distro installation driver disks). I buy one for all new PCs I get -- a smart move given the number of external Zip, Jaz, burners and whatnot that fly around the office.
Third, you can get late-model SCSI drives for under $100. Most will have enough storage for several cloned images. You don't need a modern SCSI drive, just one that will give you about 15MBps performance -- that's 10x the performance of USB!!! Add $20-40 for an external case, another $20-40 for cables and terminators and you're cooking! If you use Linux, you can hot-plug the solution and modprobe the TekRam driver on-the-fly!
Fourth, I do this for cloning. Yes, I do some over the network, but I don't always like to taxi my server in the middle of the day (among other reasons). And if I need to get the system up faster, SCSI gives me better performance than the network. Either way, USB is a slow pig and anyone who has used an external USB knows what I'm talking about! God, I cannot believe people have such ignorant, "say no to SCSI" attitudes! Geez!
Fifth, I'm glad someone else mentioned (since I forgot to) that PCMCIA SCSI cards are easily swappable, so yes, I use a PCMCIA SCSI card for the few notebook systems I have. I only need one card (and I have only one card).
Six, I do NOT disagree that IEEE1394 is a better, future solution. Frankly, I'm PO'ed that Intel is stalling on making it a standard feature in the southbridge chip (it was supposed to be standard with the PIIX4 southbridge!). I think AMD/VIA will force the issue with forthcoming chipsets and that will finally force Intel to put it on-board as well. Until then, TekRam SCSI cards are half the price and almost as fast (20MBps) as the 100-400Mbps (12.5-50MBps) Firewire cards. And, again, I'm NOT sure there is DOS/real-mode support.
[ But it's still good to see companies like Maxtor coming out with IEEE1394 drives (probably using a 33MBps 1394 to ATA bridge like this one). ]
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer