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Experiences w/ Drive Imaging Software?
"This policy of providing no way to backup and restore a fully installed system is impossible for corporations, of course. So Microsoft technical support representatives recommend sector-by-sector disk image duplication,
even though it is against Microsoft policy. Copying each sector of a hard drive bypasses Microsoft's copy protection by which Microsoft punishes all users, even if they are honest.
Sometimes Microsoft technical support recommends using 'third-party' disk image programs. For example, sometimes support representatives
recommend using Symantec Ghost.
All of the disk image duplication programs I've used have problems, in my experience. So, here's a question: What program do you use? What has been your experience with it? Can you recommend a program, or recommend staying away
from one?
Here are my experiences:
Symantec Ghost sometimes fails with non-specific error messages. Uninstalling
Ghost does not uninstall all the Ghost software. Symantec is one of the companies using copy protection, so using Symantec products may be a case of jumping from the Microsoft frying pan to the Symantec copy protection fire; also, you have no assurance that the copy protection will not become worse in the future.
PowerQuest DriveImage and DeployCenter have an uncertain future. PowerQuest
was bought by Symantec. This was after PowerQuest released DriveImage 7 with problems. The sale cannot be a happy event for those who spent hundreds of dollars on DeployCenter.
I've tried Acronis True Image. I've had better luck with it than with Symantec or PowerQuest
products. However, like the others, it sometime gives non-specific error messages that say something like, 'I've failed, and I'm not going to tell you how to troubleshoot the problem.'
Fred Langa, publisher of LangaList, recommends BootIt. I have no experience with it.
I haven't tried g4u, free, open source software provided under the BSD license g4u has the drawback that it writes only through FTP. There is no way to write to a network drive or a CD-R.
It's disgusting; people just want to make functional backups, but to do it they are dragged over the coals."
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1
If you want to encrypt after the copy you can do
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdb1
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
As far as a new machine goes, I always recommend installing a fresh copy of 2000 or XP if you are installing to just a single machine. This way everything is nice and clean, no old drivers can crud up the system, any and all resident spyware and viruses are gone. XP even has the Files & Settings Transfer Wizard to move everything over to a new machine and it has always been a good tool in my experience.
As for multiple machines, I've always gone with Norton Ghost Enterprise. Where I work, we recently got a new shipment of 120 Dell Dimension GX270 desktops, P4 2.8Ghz, 120GB disks, top of the line machines. However since we are a government agency we have certain security policies that must be in place on each machine regarding user logins, domains, file permissions and network access. Setting this up on 120 machines would be an impossible chore. So I set up a spare Dell server running Windows 2000 Advance Server with Norton Ghost Enterprise. We then took one of the new Dells, reinstalled Windows XP from scratch and began applying all security measures and end-user programs to the install. Next, a Microsoft program called System Preparation Tool was run to prepare the system for the end-user, and the machine was shut down and booted off a Norton Ghost rescue disk with drivers for the onboard ethernet. Then the machine was conencted to the Ghost server and an image of the hard disk was dumped. From there the only remaining work was to boot a dozen or so new machines at a time and point them to our Ghost server and have them image the drives, then we repackaged them and delivered them to the users. The whole process took about 2 weeks from when we got the first machine to when the last one was delivered to the user.
Norton Ghost is great for rolling out images to identical machines, but it's hit-or-miss with machines that differ on hardware. And it certainly helps to have coprorate editions of the Microsoft software to avoid activation issues.
dd bs=8192 if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
It's worked for me.
Other than that, I've used ghost.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
Have you tried using a disk imager in true DOS mode? Not the psuedo-DOS mode that is part of Windows 2000/XP, which is only a NT command shell. I would use Norton Ghost for this. If you start it under DOS, it shouldn't run into any errors, unless the disk was too big or something along those lines. The image itself should work on the new hardware but with 2000 you may encounter hardware issues and with XP you may have to reactivate.
Microsoft's policy with duping/copying is FUCKING INANE. I've switched PCI cards in my home PC only to have it flip out and require a repair install of XP on top of everything. It's just plain stupid. That poor Windows XP activation operator woman at midnight a few Saturdays ago...she got a piece of my mind.
if you boot from a linux CD, you can use dd to ghost from one XP drive to another blank harddrive. or you can even use dd and netcat together to dd over the net -- there is a google page describing how to do this
I manage an environment of approximately 7000 workstations, and I use Symantec Ghost. Ghostcast is awesome to use, and I've had no problems multicasting images. It's never failed me in 5 years.
how about windows 2000 and XP?
no, i am not trolling.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Why would you want to reinstall the OS after it has gone through "OS degradation"? (or whatever you call what happens when a Windows installation gets slower and slower over time.)
just slave the drive then make your backup.
don't use windows.
you mean dd?
Works great!
I mean, I've probably forgotten more ways of doing disk backups on Linux than Windows has available :-)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I use ghost all the time and have never had a problem with XP or any other OS. Have you looked at your methods? Is something else going on that is throwing you off?
I used to use PowerQuest Drive Image and Partition Magic back in my Windows days, and they were good, solid products. I haven't used the latest versions since I don't use Windows anymore, but I hear that they've gone to Product Activation. If that's true, I personally wouldn't buy any more of their stuff, but that's a judgement call I guess.
NAMBLA
Did you try booting knopix and using dd to take an image ? Simple, free, bit perfect copies.
Maybe you live in interesting times
This may be naive but... what about:
1) Boot from favorite UNIX-based OS-on-a-floppy.
2) Sector-by-sector copy the old HD to another new HD.
3) Grow/resize the new HD accordingly.. I don't think PartitionMagic has broken that. (And there are probably other utilities out there equally good)
4) Change the NT unique ID (if the old OS will remain on the old system).
Granted, it's not nice, nor really deployable.. but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
-- dforce
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
Reimaging an existing harddrive copies everything that the OS screwed up too. Reinstallation works much better if what you want is a stable system again. That's the reality of windows.
Mac OSX.
:D
Works like a charm!
I've used Modboot along with Ghost 2002 to perfectly copy Windows XP systems. Drive Image Pro somewhat works, but not always. Ghost has never given me issue.
Modboot is really nice in that you can make a network boot disk for pretty much any network card that was or is in production without much hassle.
I maintain several labs. We currently use Partimage off a gentoo live cd. This works great for windows 2000 machines in our labs. Previously I used ghost with no problems on windows NT, but 2000 might be different. I always used it from a "boot" disk not from a running system.
Andrew
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
Two things you can do are to customise an OS install using the "OEM" section to do the installs for you, or use a deployment system like Tivoli, Unicenter, or Vision64...
To make a perfectly operational copy of your mare, all you need is a stallion!
about 40 minutes ago i came to /., saw this story, (with a submit time of 12:something), saw no comments so i hit reply, it just sent me to a page about active discussions i could comment on. i went back to the main page and the story was gone. i dont even have an account here, let alone a subscription. oh well, this happen to anyone else?
I don't think the article you referenced says that Microsoft does not support disk duplication. Quite to the contrary, they have their own tool to avoid problems with SIDs on cloned machines, and they certainly expect people to use it. I've always used Ghost for duplicating Windows installs with no real problems. True, their licensing is getting uglier, but they have the best product, hands down. So just prepare your build with all of your software and settings. If you have multiple hardware configurations you plan to run the build on, create a folder on the hard disk and save any special drivers you might need. Then run Microsoft's sysprep tool (there is documentation for using on the WinXP CD). Finally, create your ghost image, and you should be good to go.
Well at the place I used to work IT at we used an older version of Norton Ghost and had no problems with it. I can't check what version it was because it won't run under Windows and I don't have a machine I can reboot right now. 7.0? Something like that.
Either way, just whip the top off the box, stick in your drive with the image on and use Ghost on a boot disk. Never had a problem with Windows 95, 98 or 2k, including NTFS.
Pulling images down off the network was a bit of a chore, as it'd fail if the lag got too high . . .
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
I actually do just use hardware. I feel XP's hardware detection is decent enough that if I'm swapping among similar chipsets, I can just move physical drives around no problem. Of course, you have a good long wait while things are detected and installed, but if you're running proprietary file-server oriented boxes, bypassing this and manually enabling different driver sets isn't too tough. Yes, it's a nuisance, but it can be done.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
There might be GPL issues that'd compound your Microsoft issues of sector-by-sector copying, but aren't we entitled to a backup? Which laws trump which?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
If you've got a linux box, dd's the way to go. Pop the windows drive and the spare drive in, clone.
Of course, before my linux days, we always used a copy of Ghost. Forget which version, but it was small enough to drop on a win98 boot floppy, so you could just boot from the floppy and run ghost. Never gave us any problems in our small little repair lab, and saved our butts on those 30-system custom-build orders.
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
http://www.partimage.org/
I've had a lot of success using Knoppix and dd. Knoppix is a full linux distro on a CD.
I image a lot of identical laptops. With Knoppix, I can pop in a boot CD along with a pcmcia firewire card attached to a big external drive. Everything (even sound!) is detected on boot up and I can mount the external drive and dd an image to or from. I can write a 20 gig image to the laptop in just over 12 minutes. Going the other way takes a bit longer... haven't figured that one out.
I was using ghost, but its a royal pain. Limited support for external devices (no pcmcia support). Network backups involve making DOS/Windows for Workgroup (!) boot disks. Ick all around. Knoppix works much better. Network interfaces are also detected and configured via dhcp, so I could do net backups as well.
I have seen a hardware hard-drive ghoster. You take two drives, hook them up, and the machine copies the data drive onto the empty drive. I imagine this is a nearly foolproof way to ghost a machine, the only trouble being if you have two really different drives and the HHD ghoster doesn't recognize them. Still, I recommend hardware over software.
stuff |
Silly Microsoft. Why didn't Microsoft just do this?
if (user_honesty == 1)
//copy protection disabled
else
//no copy for you!
(I'll probably be mod'ed down here...) MSFT is probably right here: Imaging your entire system and putting it on other hardware may not work because of differing in hardware that requires different software to be installed, even if it's just firmware revision differences in your BIOS of sound card, you may need to load a different driver.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Boot KNOPPIX live from CD-ROM but copied to RAM, configure the CD burner of the system being backed up, use dd (or mkisofs or ...) to perform the copy.
Well someone may beat me to this but use linux dd. Best would be to use something like knoppix (bootable linux CD with no need for installing anything to the system), and then use:
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=//disk.image
Then when you need to restore the image on the system:
dd if=//disk.image of=/dev/hda1
(where the disk.image is the one you created above.) Best way would be to store the images on a networked linux server on a nfs share. That way you just mount the share on the localhost once you boot up into knoppix and then issue the dd command.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
All the people suggesting dd are absolutely right. It's simple and it works. And you can put a regular file for "of" if you want to create a disk image file.
I don't see why g4u's use of FTP for uploading drive images is that bad. Surely it isn't hard to throw up a Linux box running an ftp daemon, or enable FTP on IIS on your NT box.
I for one don't even bother with Symantec products anymore. If you know how to use Linux or BSD, fixing Windows problems through them is a snap. And from the looks of it, I'm glad I stopped supporting Symantec. They've become dirty with their DRM, and they haven't updated many of the Norton SystemWorks tools for Windows XP.
At the risk of sounding arrogant... Ghost and friends have devolved into handholders for Unix-illiterate MCSEs. Phooey, Symantec.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
Use the Sysprep tool to remove workstation specific stuffn ning/incremental/sysprep11.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/pla
Then use Symantec Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image
As long as the hardware is not very differant it should work very well
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
I for one welcome our new unsupported and bug plagued drive imaging overlords..
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
This is the best for disk imaging in my oppinion I use it all the time at my work.
you can copy vmware virtual machines around (as the host filesystem is in Linux). You can add storage, or hardware and it also supports (at least the version 3) USB and soud devices. Gives you solid network access, good recovery (in case of a crash you can opt to not to commit changes done to filesystem to the image). Runs pretty well too. I have it on a P3/800 system and I like it.
you also can run multiple copies of a virtual machine on a Linux host (after doing some manual tweaks like changing the MAC address per running copy). No need for a Windows XP/2000 terminal server!
This
So, you're saying that for at least ten percent of the population, Windows is the best choice?
Chassis your Windows drive into a Mac and image/clone it via CarbonCopy Cloner, Retrospect, etc. 100% mirror, no problem.
I recently upgraded the hd on my Win2000 machine. I took both the old and new drives and connected them to a linux machine, then used dd to transfer the data and VolumeManager (same company as PartitionMagic) to grow the partition to the size of the new drive. Worked fine.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Basicly the microsoft link to a page which says "use Sysprep.exe, before you try to image a system". I am guessing that this removes the sid and puts the system in a state to generate new ones. The microsoft link about "problems with Ghost" says Ghost 2001 can't do NTFS try Ghost 2002. The power quest "problem" was that .NET needed to be installed. OK it uses C#. WOW that's a problem. The rest of the links are the same, i.e. generally about the product, but don't mention the problem the submitter indicated.
I would like to see a discussion about drive imaging software, but if you are going to make charges, at least back them up with links that makes your case!
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
oh god, here comes the mac fanboys, this guy needs advice on copying pc files!
use the software mirror that has been included in windows since at least NT4.0.
1. put in an identical drive, and make a mirror
2. run the machine for a few hours while it syncs up.
3. reboot and take out the fully mirrored drive.
that takes a while, but it should provide a decent solution to backup all of the files on a windows machine. You can even run the system while the backup is running. You still have to reboot at least twice, and have a drive that is equal or greater in size, but it should work flawlessly if you know what you're doing.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Come on don't be shy, we know there are lots of you out there... So how is it to be working at MS Product Activation Call Center ? Do you really get abused badly ?? Angry slashdot mob wants to know :o)
When I needed once to view some "wholly locked" file I finally did this: launch VMWare, connect host drive for the guest system, copy said locked file(s) from the guest system to your host system over virtual network. I said it's silly ;)
"Microsoft supplies no method of backing up and restoring fully operational copies of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. "
.BKF file to each machine, and use it to extract the system state and program files into the right spot.
Mostly true, but not entirely. NTBackup.exe will save your system state (registry, drivers, etc) plus you can backup Program Files and Documents and Settings etc too. In theory (meaning: I've never done this) you could do one install of Windows, install your apps, then use NTBackup to save your system state and your Program Files/Docs and Sets folders. Then, you could go to the other machines, first do a vanilla install of Windows, copy the
I will say again I have never done specifically this. but I have saved a mucked up registry using this techique before. In your position, it's a method I'd explore. Expect limitations. For example, I don't know if XP'll shit itself over it's activation process. I suggest this as a direction to explore, not as a solution I'd stand behind.
Oh, one other thing, XP doesn't install NTBackup.exe by default, you have to extract it from the XP CD. Google has plenty of help here.
... is the dreaded "Inaccessible Boot Device" message you get when swapping motherboards.
h erboard/problems.htm, but they're all either a pain in the ass or don't work.
There are some solutions at http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/other/mot
Does XP have this problem, too, or is it smart enough to load the default IDE drivers when an incompatible chipset is detected during bootup?
Ghost has worked fine for me in the past, but I really like Novell's Zenworks server. I haven't tried Ghostcast so I'm guessing they're somewhat similar, but Zenworks uses a 3-disk Linux boot floppy system and their image program can back up and restore onto local and server-based images. With some finagling, you can just create those floppy disks and copy straight from one drive to another (and unlike dd, it's a file-by-file rather than bit-by-bit copy).
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
I think the company is long out of business so maybe you can find the program floating around out there. Works great on the same hardware. Set up one pc, image it up to the server. Push it out to up to 255 pc at the same time. I still use an older version on a school lan to restore (and update) their labs. Been doing it since 1998. Image restore takes about 30 minutes for 20 pc's. The only issue is the pc's sid's. You have to remove, then add each pc back into the domain.
That statement says Microsoft supports imaged copies of specific versions of Windows that also use the Sysprep utility.
:-p
It also has the side effect of making sure you have all of your OS licenses. Or is that a problem?
Sysprep is your friend if you have a pile of apps and want to reinstall multiple copies of them quickly. I use Symantec Ghost myself, and the image in question has Win2K, Office 2K, a bunch of 16-bit apps, Acrobat Reader, a bunch of 32-bit apps to go with said 16-bit apps, IE6, and other stuff I forget or don't want to disclose at this time, and Sysprep makes these all imageable.
In that sense it doesn't matter WHAT imaging software you use to make a mass copy of Windows, as long as you Sysprep it before the fact.
As for disaster recovery backups of a single workstation, the included NTBACKUP still is tried and true. Though I liked the NT4 version better than the Win2K version.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
Works fine for Windows XP. The only time I've gotten bizarre errors is the last shut down was "dirty". Restart, Error Check, and ghost after the reboot.
I've also used DD from a linux boot disk. It takes forever, but used to handle imaging some drives that older versions of Ghost (pre 6.0) would choke on.
I tinkered with Acronis, but didn't care much for the limitations. (I'd like to be able to image a drive connected via USB with another OS image. Acronis only seemed concerned with its system drive, and nothing else.)
(Off topic: pretty much any USB key can be made bootable if you image it with an existing bootable partition. Having to shut down and do this through DOS gets to be a pain. I was hoping Acronis would allow me to take a DOS6 partition and copy it to any number of USB keys connected to the system.) If anyone has any thoughts on that one, I'd love to hear them.
I've had very good experiences with the Ghost software. We build bootable CD's with a system image spanned over three CD's. Pop in the CD, boot from CD, goes straight to the Ghost app, restore image and 20 minutes later you have a fully restored system. We use this to clone laptops frequently and it has yet to cause a problem.
j.
*bzzt* sorry , wrong answer.
You obviously meant to say "Losedows".
Maybe Symantec has copy protection bullshit, but I've never once seen Ghost carp about licenses. And I can't imagine it was because the IT dept was doing their job properly (at a former place of work).
There are a few things that you don't want to duplicate exactly when you're installing on a bunch of machines, even with identical hardware. If I understand correctly, that's the whole point of Ghost. dd doesn't always cut it if you're doing 400 installs on separate machines.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
rembo (http://www.rembo.com/) works extremely well for us. supports bsd, linux, windows.
"installing them all may take a week or even more?"
Sorry. If it takes you a week to install replication software, you shouldn't be in IT.
One word. Ghost. It works. If you see limitations with the normal version, grab the enterprise edition which offers Ghost servers and network system replication, with just a floppy on the client machine.
Sounds like.... Debian net-intstall floppies!
We used Altiris to reimage all 10,000 machines on our network with Windows XP... not an easy job but we were able to do it all remotely and even on different types with a single image.
Works great. We don't install it on the machines, instead we setup a machine, make an image using the boot disks to net dump it to the ghost server, and then either burn to cd to manually do single machines or we broadcast it to a whole lab.
Installing stuff for Ghost? Ours runs completely off floppy - either the client or the server.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
dd if=/dev/hda of=/backup/today/hda.raw /backup/ is a removable harddrive for backups - possibly one from which you booted the system to Linux to make the backup.
where
Then eventually run "gzip" or "bzip2" over that. You get a perfect mirror, that recovers everything, including MBR, partition tables, deleted files for undelete and empty diskspace (which is lucklily very compressable).
Recovery?
dd if=/backup/thatday/hda.raw of=/dev/hda
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Back when I did IT support for a large university, we had a problem of disting Windows images to each machine (for those who are not familiar, it's to synchronize each machine with a master image upon logout). It was easy on the Mac, but the best we could do in the Windows world was to use PC-RDist, a piece of software written probably by high school kids in their parents' garage. It did not handle Microsoft software very well. Even with a fully-functional image set up, we had to manually go to each machine and install the MS software (WindowsUpdate patches, Office, etc.) BEFORE we can download the updates from the master image. Plus, any updates to the registry would not be copied because of Windows Protection. Eventually, we just gathered up enough funding (it was hard) to get disk imaging software whenever we needed to hose down a machine and start from scratch. I'm glad I don't have to work in IT anymore. :-)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Try Altiris out, www.altiris.com, it just sucks that it cant do disk to disk duplications, has to be done over a network.
-r-
As an anecdote, here at college, it's the M$ way or the highway (tongue only partially in cheek). The main way that the sysadmins monitor and successfully update/upgrade university-owned computers on campus is by a sector-by-sector disk image over the network. This results in horrendous problems because not all of the machines are identically hardware compatible -- it's caused problems with display adapters (no, the LCD monitor's native resolution in the Windows Lab in the science building is NOT 640x480x8 ...), inabilities of people to log onto machines because the machines have not been "verified as authentic" and numerous other problems. As much as I hate to say that Micro$haft may be right (there goes my karma), they do have a point that it's best for individual installs and then updates. Perhaps M$'s software is just too stupid to recognize that the $PROPRIETARY_HARDWARE_DISPLAY_ADAPTER is not available and should go with something else?
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
Most large corporate IT shops have a standardized software load and no requirement to image a running PC - for the times we do need to image a machine we use Symantec's Ghost and image the machine to one of five snap servers. Works every time.
The only time I've had Ghost balk at an image was when I tried to image a RAID5 array - and RAID support with Ghost is kinda hit and miss - it's officially unsupported.
My unsolicited thoughts on this issue are that one should backup data, not the OS. If things are screwed up enough to require a wipe and restore you probably don't want to restore the OS anyway :)
I don't back up the OS - I keep everything I need in my "My Documents" folder - and I have a batch that runs every night that copies my "My Documents" folder to my wife's computer and vice versa.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
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).
Knoppix comes with PartImage, a ghost clone for linux. Here's the PartImage web page:
o pers/02/11/02 /1752208.shtml?tid=130
http://www.partimage.org/
Also, you can resize partitions with knoppix using qtparted:
http://www.partimage.org/
Download the ISO, burn, enjoy.
You also might want to check out this link here for a related discussion:
http://developers.slashdot.org/devel
I haven't tried g4u, free, open source software provided under the BSD license g4u has the drawback that it writes only through FTP. There is no way to write to a network drive or a CD-R.
You can get an add-on program for linux that will mount http and ftp sites. This is then a network drive. It's called unbelievably enough "ftpmount".
Thanks, Steve
They would prefer that you did not back up, because Windows slowly fucks itself over time with the abortion they call the registry. This way you have to do a clean install every now and then, and it cleans up whatever little problems it has.
"Can you recommend a program,"
Linux? Ba-dum-dum.....hey, stop throwing cans at me!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Veritas has Backup Exec which provides such capabilities. It's not cheap, but quite powerful.
A great way I found to get around the Windows system copying problems as well as Windows "Secured" directories is just boot under a Linux Live cd and mount the harddrives.
/dev/hda /dev/hdb seemed to work great for me. For a friend that had to access those "Protected" directories, I was able to mount the NTFS partition and create a new FAT32 partition and copy whatever files I wanted from the NTFS. It worked great, and he was able to save his 10 GB of "personal files" =)
Running cp
I work in a college environment, and we use the Zenworks Imaging Engine. It is a linux based CLI and it can natively read/write NTFS filesystems. It supports both Unicast and Multicast. I even wrote a simple bash script and put it on the boot cd to do backups in the format of machinename-date.zmg They have a windows based utility to add/remove files from the image after you've created it. The only drawback to this solution vs something like ghost, is that it does require a server running E-directory. If your Novell shop it's a great fit, if your not it might be a bit pricy to get E-Directory and Zenworks.
I'm not sure if this was a serious suggestion or not, but this is exactly how I do it! I use this method to clone linux cluster nodes, but it would work for windows as well.
I use a boot floppy, with the grub bootloader (you could skip the floppy entirely if your hardware supports PXE booting, and you feel like messing with it). The bootloader grabs a kernel and ramdisk image from a tftp server. Then, a shell script creates a fifo, connect it to the tftp server, uses dd to copy to/from the image.
Here's an example of the shell script to make a backup (just do the reverse to restore):
This method was adapted from the clone HOWTO, which has more in-depth instructions.
Dude, you can skip C:\pagefile.sys
But seriously, I just finished a contract at a large bank maanging the disaster recovery for a w2k advanced server environment(over 100 servers around the world, terabytes of data). To make it more complicated it was exchange (now there is a backup anoyance).
I never had any problems even using the internal NT backup (before they chose a solution).
All you need is a good DR procedure.
In short:
1. Make backups (Full, diff and incremental to taste)
2. Have OS install disks ready.
3. At disaster time, install the OS and any drivers necessary to access the backup hardware.
4. Restore over the top of the OS, wipe everything.
5. Reboot and get coffee, done.
It is more complicated for Active Dir DC's and GC's etc but it's not rocket science.
Some apps require special backup programs (like e2k) or that you simply shut down services while you backup but to tell the truth, this happens in the Unix world (and mac world) as well.
I have never seen w2k fail on a file that is critical and distinct to each instance. A new install just makes a new file (for example pagefile.sys)
I seem to remember our turnaround was 12 hours for an e2k server with 10 databases and 350gb of mail storage. (Assuming the SAN did not have to be rebuilt, then it was more like 20 hours).
Mondo is a linux/unix utility but it can backup and restore windows whatever partitions/drives. Depending on the filesystem type it might also be able to resize the partitions on restore. It makes
may or maynot work for you.
Scott
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
If you want to stick to just Windows, and you don't want to use something like Ghost (which find very effective), then have a minimal NT (4/5.0/5.1/5.2) install on another partition. Boot in to it and you will have what you need. I recommend hiding the other partitions before doing a multi-boot NT system to avoid them sharing the same boot.ini/ntldr/etc - you can add the entries to boot.ini later.
Personally I would just go with Ghost. We use it a lot (several times/day for several years now), and it's not that big a deal.
Related to this, what would one do about an older laptop without a working cdrom, with no OS on it. Wish to get win98 on it, but having issues since I cannot get my network card working. It is PCMCIA, and the boot disks/setups I have tried have not supported it, so I cant do much! It does have an a: drive which works, and the network card WILL work.
I am thinking of resorting to opening the case, pulling the HD, and putting it in a friends lappie that has a working cdrom
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
We use Drive Image 2000 (so I can't speak to the problems people report with the latest version) and we have never had a problem creating or restoring an image. Boot from the boot disks into dos and away you go.
As far as sysprep is concerned, we've seen some problems with it on xp machines in that after sysprep is run, some of the settings that *were* in the default user profile are no longer there. We came to the conclusion that sysprep is junk and unnecessary if you replace it with NewSID from sysinternals.com. A much better piece of software that is less complicated and does exactly what we want, instead of what MS wants.
I fail to see what the linked MS KB article has to do with drive imaging for backup or transferring purposes.
/. story. If you're looking to take all of the files on the HD (including those in use or flagged as being important to the OS) then you can use the native W2K/XP backup utility to back up to a file. No tapes are necessary. If you want to do a full restore to the same system, you can do so. If you want to restore to another system you can do so.
The article clearly states that MS does not support drive imaging as a *deployment* method. Nowhere does it say that disk duplication software is not allowed ever.
Back to the question hidden at the end of the
There are other misleading statements in the original poster's message. He includes a link implying that Ghost is Microsoft's recommended tool for drive imaging when the KB article says nothing of the sort.
lol. external firewire drive?? Then you only have to worry about your data-retention issues!
for me. I am in a University lab with 130+ Dell machines with WinXP. I have used Ghost Enterprise 6, 7, 7.5, and the home edition, and the only one that works well is 7.5. I have about 10 different images for different rooms and 3 different configurations of computers. Once I got a system for ghosting in place, everything works well. I occasionally run into weird quirks with the software (identical images doing slightly different things after ghosting, etc.), but these issues are easily fixed. While 7.5 lacks some functionality I would like, I have managed to create startup scripts, .bat files, and other little tweaks to get everything to work fine. I was able to roll out 130 computers with 5 different configurations in 2 weeks (1 for making all 5 images and 1 for actually unpacking, setting up, and ghosting all the computers.)
And don't listen to people that say to switch to Mac and use CCC and Netrestore and ASR, with either firewire or an Xserve. It is in no way easier or more intuitive than ghost, and takes 3 times as long to do 16 iMacs compared to 60 Dell computers.
Well, I might have a small bit of knowledge in this area, as I dupe like systems in various sized lots from 1's and 2's up to 50 - 80 units at a time. I have a ton of Dupe software, but if your one that does this Duplication on a frequent basis like I do, then the only solution is to get a hard drive mass duplication machine, currently I am using the ImageMasster 2000 by ICS. Other software that I have found useful and work well with W2K and WinXP, is Nortons Ghost 2002, DriveImage by powerquest.
The key is to create a Bootable CD (I have worked hard at the start of our venture to remove all Floppy Drives - waste of resources and useless) So the only way to boot a system other then through the HD is via Network or CD, Network has its advantages, but the CD is the best way to go. I create a bootable CD (there are several different types of Dos style boot images out there, I currently use an old Win98 Basic DOS boot, and PCDos) with Ghost on it and then boot with that CD and both HD's (be careful when doing this that you have the correct source and destination drives). I also did the same thing with DriveImage software though I only use that for really persistant and tough HD's. As this software takes far longer to Dupe, but does a pretty thorough job.
For really bad drives with images that can not be removed or repartitioned, I use a combo boot CD with AEFDisk on it (this little utility will repair or remove and partition you have set onto a HD's Disks).
Well good luck and I hope you haev found this of some use.
If firefighters fight fire and crime fighters fight crime, what do Freedom fighters fight?
use vmware and image the disk as one big .vmx file... when the stuff breaks, just copy a vmx file across the network and you're done.
ZEN works 4.01 and Symantec Ghost 7.5 Corp both work beautifully for me. We have 110 Dell Optiplex Workstations(identical hardware).
Isn't this discussion similiar to one you would NOT have when calling up Microsoft asking them how to image a *nix workstation? /. is a *NIX site not a Microsoft site (MS Bashing perhaps). I would advise the poster to go hang around some of the MS boards, of which there are plenty.
This issue, has been discussed and resolved many times over by many different people.
Ghost, PQ Magic, SYSPrep, etc. I have seen 1000s of corporations roll out imaged systems just fine.
Working for computer services for my university, we have recently dropped Ghost for Novell ZenWorks imaging. This is a linux based imaging software, that I think is fairly simple, if you don't mind typing. example:
//server/path/to/image/file
For a image residing on a server that you want to bring down:
img restorep server
The only issue that I have ran acrossed is that sometimes it will give the wrong error. I've received the error that it couldn't find the server, but it was a hard drive issue. I think though this is an easy imaging software, and if you are up for fun, its seems that you can edit some of the config files to automatically image stuff, but I'm not for certain.
I use Paragon Hard Disk Manager. Does a few things more than just copy images but seems to work with copying XP (at least I haven't had any problems). Granted, I'm only a home user, but maybe this could work for you.
C:\>format C:
I've been using Drive Image 7 for months. I've used both DI and Ghost in the past for years. It's been my experience that DI7 is faster than Ghost, and you can backup right to a CD or DVD from within Windows. IMO it was the nex logical step. I also initially didn't care for the .NET framework requirement, but haven't noticed any ill effects after installing it, and I'm pretty anal about things like that.
My vote is for DI7.
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Legacy from MS-DoS, "system files" get screwed up that way. Same as you can't move vmlinuz around the harddrive without running 'lilo' (or whatever) later, plain 'cp' doesn't give warranty that files copied back to harddrive land exactly in the same disk sectors...where some system tools could expect them. So rather go with 'dd' than 'cp'.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
While I know the pain of reinstalling, some times it just works better. For doing backups of one machine, where as I want to upgrade my drive, Ghost 2004 has a few slick features. Install it under Windows, tell it what drives you want to back up and where to (cd-r/rw & dvd-+r/rw drives supported, including disk spanning). Machine reboots, and runs it's backup. To restore, put in disk 1. It's that slick.
If you aren't educated enough in Microsoft administration ( which seems to be the case ), grab a book and read up on sysprep. Its designed to deal with this very problem with transferring images to other hardware. I belive even 'box purchasers' get this.. but it might only be enterprse level...
Add any imaging product you want to this, and your problem is solved.
If you have an enterprise setup ( which I doubt due the question ) check into RIS to distribute your 'image' via the wire..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you just want back up dups to blowback the image after a cataclysmic event then any dup software will work.
If you want to install 1000 "core loads" then you need to script the install working with a wise type installer and using the M$ install tools.
M$ is more than willing to work with any company that has a large number of desktop machines to build/rebuild on a regular basis.
They are two different problems. You shouldn't really be using a full dupe image to do installs anyway...use the right tool, a scriptable build tool(not that it won't work but it's not a good practice given that keys and generated hashes are becoming more prevelent in all of technology.) For backups an image dupe works fine.
BTW, the article you linked to was about fixing the SIDS after a dupe not about how you couldn't do it. They did state that they don't provide support to OSes installed in this manner as a side note however.
cant believe no one has mentioned zenworks... very flexible, you can script it, add-on images...
Works every time! At least, it does on systems that are worth using.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Four years ago I worked at the the Taylor University computer science department. We had 70+ dual-booting NT/Linux machines running 80+ DOS/Win3.1/Win95/WinNT applications. To further complicate this, Ghost (ImageCast, etc.) would not work since the hardware was widely varying and we wanted several different installation profiles (including/excluding certain apps).
We came up with a solution which allowed an individual to install and configure
70+ machines in two hours (requiring only about 30-40 minutes of the
individual's time). This tool, called JACAL, is still being used and was expanded to work with Win 2K and XP.
Here is our solution:
* A boot disk containing only a DHCP kernel-autoconfig NFS root kernel
* an NFS server with the NT i386 image and a base unattend.txt file. This NFS server doesn't necessarily need to be a Linux box. This could be an NT box running WarNFS or something like that if someone wanted to do that.
* a series of perl scripts which, given the machine name and hardware probe information, customize the unattend.txt file
* a perl script which sucessively launch installation of apps after the initial NT build is complete
* a perl script which installs diffs from Microsoft's SysDiff program (we have really augmented this process if you are rightfully having doubts about the standard SysDiff process)
* a script which does DLL and other file conflict and version resolution
* a SaMBa server which houses the diffs of the applications
* a series of ScriptIt files to install apps that don't SysDiff well (MS IE 5, MS Publisher 2000, MS NT SP 5 (6? not yet baby, not yet), sense a theme. Typically these are things which perform OS upgrades (are apps supposed to do that>??))
* Perl and ActiveState Perl run the system from the Linux and NT sides
Features (for both OSs):
* All applications installed and ready to run
* Drivers installed and working (detection done with Linux)
* Centralized log of hardware from each workstation
Other things that we considered but never implemented:
* Remote network PXE(bootp/dhcp) instead of current floppy/CD kickoff disk
* Multicasting file copies
Keep and eye out for a post by "nathane" as he is a maintainer of the current JACAL system at Taylor University.
There is also a **woefully** out of date website at jacal.sf.net.
I've been wondering for some time actually how dd treats partition tables. Say I have a 40gb drive and image it using:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/hda.11-12-03
If I then get a 120gb drive and go to restore that image will it create only the 40gb partitions and leave the rest of the space unused/unpartitioned? I've never had enough hardware laying around to find out.
Frisbee is a university project that we use to do software regression testing. We have to reimage machines all the time.
Read the whitepaper for how it works. The long and the short of it, is that I can take a hard disk image that previously was deployed via Ghost and 5 CDs and distribute it to N machines on our LAN in about 4 to 5 minutes. Cool stuff.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
While I like Norton Ghost and have used the Enterprize edition many times for rollouts I have found that it's more trouble than it's worth.
With Ghost you HAVE to have the same (or almost the same) hardware on every machine, Windows 2000 isn't too bad with it's improved PnP but NT4 is a bitch to image even with the "same" machines, just one little diffeence and you have to update and test your ghosted changes.
I use my own three pronged approach.
Install Windows. I have a batch file that creates a partition on the fly, copies the cabs to the hard drive and installs the OS.
Once the machine logs in it runs a batch file (according to department) which installs every software package as an MSI file.
Finally I use Robocopy to back up the users data directories to a remote server periodically.
Robocopy > Ghost
It isn't as fast as restoring an image, but it's hardware independant and it's easier to maintain and update packages.
Right now I'm working on something similar with rsync on Linux, it's easier but harder to learn.
John the Kiwi
Windows we use ImageCast. (think Ghost over a network) to date we have never had a known good image used to re-image go sour without bad hardware being involved.
Linux / MacOSX
www.Radmind.org - Note this is not "backup" software perse, instead its a file maintanence solution. An image is based off a transcript + files. The transcript is downloaded to the client and a file system comparison is run to check for any file differences. Any file changes are restored by downloading that file only from the server, and any extra files not on transcript are deleted. (you can of course have non-maintained folders)
It might be too much to do for a large number of machines, but if you're backing up to an NFS mount, is it possible to boot a live CD like Knoppix (altered for your use, of course) and copy all the files over to an NFS partition?
I'd think it would be possible to modify Knoppix or another live CD so it would boot, backup, and exit (if possible, then, reboot the hard drive??).
Sysprep installation images can encapsulate all of your apps and you just reimage to restore. The Microsoft licensing/activation crap does not apply to corporate users.
IBM has a program called ImageUltra that will let you make modular images.
Once you build the images you need, you can rebuild workstations in 5-15 minutes without administrator intervention.
There is no legitimate reason for backing up workstations -- they should be as "throwaway" as possible. Backing them up is doing nothing but wasting time and money.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I've had luck copying drives over using a bootCD and simply tarring or tar-gzipping the drive, but there's still annoyances with bootsectors, etc, etc.
Does anyone know a good tool for making/installing a bootsector image that is windows-friendly?
On a side-note, sometimes using images to move to upgraded hardware is a pain, especially with XP/2K/etc. You do get all your DLL's and program links, etc, but you also get a bunch of hardware drivers that don't match unless you move to pretty much an identical machine. Major hardware upgrades usually ensure that my PC gets a much-needed format+reinstall, at least for my windows drive anyhow...
If the issue is a large system that you're afraid you're going to have to duplicate on the fly there are other things to consider. Make sure to use protections such as Raid (software or hardware) and/or clustering of multiple servers.
Even then you may need to install a machine but at least you have time to perform the task at hand.
Next, look at backup solutions such as Legato Networker. Many of these create a recovery floppy that you simply insert and it retrieves what you need 'automatically' this assumes you have the tapes in and ready and such but the system can rebuild itself.
So Microsoft has crippled file systems, their policy on imaging sounds laughable to you, none of the disk imaging software is adequate for your discriminating tastes, and HOLY CRAP you just realized that you can't XCOPY a fucking modern operating system to another computer.
Why on earth are you sticking with a platform that you obviously despise? Your best solution seems to be, move to another platform already! Listen carefully, Linux is calling to you... You sound like the type of user who would rather use a platform he hates and constantly complain about it, instead of actually solving his own problems.
Your second best solution would be, write your own damn imaging software. Seriously if Ghost is so deficient it should be pretty easy to write better software, right?
The fact that Microsoft doesn't support disk imaging doesn't mean it isn't possible. Everyone does it, and by everyone I mean like 99% of fortune 500 companies. If they can all figure out how to use Ghost perhaps maybe YOU are doing something wrong? I've never had the problem you describe with Ghost, either.
Oh and finally? You're actually completely wrong. ASR along with backup software (such as Windows Backup) can completely restore your system from media in the event of a crash.
Then, in the event that your hard drive fails, you can use the Automated System Recovery to completely restore your system to the state it was in the last time you backed up... including all programs and settings. Basically, what it does is do a minimal Windows install, then boots into Windows and prompts you for your backup media, and promptly restores it. I have yet to try the restore, but this site describes the process in detail with screenshots.
Note that this is for XP Pro... I don't know about XP Home or 2000.
It runs an install from sources on an NFS share and it also allows for the setup of batch scripts to automatically install any programs you may want once Windows is first installed.
Supports booting from floppy, cd or PXE boot and away you go with a fully unattended windows + applications install.
Takes slightly more setup than a ghost system but can be exteremely useful and more importantly free..
37 - what does it stand for really...
I have used this software for many years and have been very satisfied. I generally have an additional hard drive specifically for holding a full size image. Kind of like a manual RAID system, if you will. If the primary HD goes down, I simply unplug it, rearrange cable and the jumper on the back-up so it is the master, run an FDISK /mbr, and it boots as if nothing happened. In a short period of time I am back up and running. I have also used the backup to CD-ROM feature before, but that is fast becoming too much labor. I have also restored a compressed image to save a system with great results. In my opinion, the software is worth the money. It will recognize EXT3 file systems too.
StyleChief
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! -M. Python
I recently copied a running XP PRO system from a 9GB disk to a 36GB disk. There was a minor issue with my not selecting the correct function the first time, but after clearing that up, it worked like a charm. I got a 36GB single partition with the same bootable XP system running in it.
I'd personally use dd if I had a Linux box around and could, but if you'd like a simple inexpensive tool for Windows that just works try Undisker
For personal use, I recently used Western Digital's Data Lifeguard software (http://support.wdc.com/download/) to ghost a 40 GB partition onto a new, blank 80 GB drive. The software can be run either off of a boot floppy or through Windows, and it copied a Windows 2000 SP2 install perfectly, without any issues. The new drive became the primary hard drive in my system, and I've been using it for six months without any problems.
The downside is that this isn't for large-scale ghosting; I believe you need to have both drives physically present in the machine in order to perform the operation.
I've used Acronis PartitionExpert to copy partitions from disk to disk. The Trueimage does this role but PartitionExpert seemed more flexible for what I wanted as I did upgrade by physically installed the disk and then copied over and automatically resized my partitions 1 by 1 over a period of time (week or so). The software created a bootable CDROM for you to get around the silly windows file locking. Very neat. IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTE: remember to edit the old c:\boot.ini to add in the new physical location if you've changed the count of the partitions i.e. primary verses logical for partition 1,2,3, etc. It its identical then OK, but sometimes you may wnat to stick in a spare partition to keep aside for alternate OS (especially on some great big 120 Gig drive which even most peoples MP3 collection would have trouble filling). You can edit this file in Notepad.exe before you copy the partition else it won't boot correctly on the new disk (error message like can't find C:\windows\system32 etc etc).
I've used Linux's dd before and it's worked. Athough I wasn't creating backups so much as doing HD dupes, the OS was Windows and the drives were identical. I booted into Linux on a floppy that had little on there except dd.
... anyone know why that would happen?
One caveat- the drive copying was SLOW AS HELL. I have no idea why... We're talking about 8 hours to dupe a 4 GB HD with
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
You can also build packages, essentially by doing an OS-wide diff to build a "patch". You can use these to deploy individual applications, configuration setttings, or whatever. So, for example, around here I have an image containing Windows XP and Office, and then I have packages for the optional stuff. Packages are usually deployed remotely, from the server, but they're just normal EXEs, so you can run them manually.
Although I haven't tried it yet, you could migrate a user's settings by making a package from the differences between his/her current machine, and the original image.
You can also do fun things like schedule deployments (complete with Wake on LAN) remote-control computers, or just spy on people.
Wish I had moderation points right now. I'd give you a "Funny"
http://www.emulab.net/software.php3 This is the best disk imaging solution as far as we know. We use it in emulab to reload disks very frequently. Read the Usenix paper mentioned in the above page for details.
I've tried out numerous sytems, and they all require DOS for the actual reimaging process!
What this means is that we techs have to deal with the nastiness of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT as well as getting a proper driver stack working. Indeed, every NIC card manufacturer out there has to employ a few goons who know how to code 16-bit DOS TSRs so that Corporate America can use their cards en mass.
Anybody out there want to make some real $$$ out there? Finish up the NTFS module for Linux, and from there enterprising souls will be able to write a decent reimaging solution that's current and maintained. Symantec, Altiris, and the rest will be put out of business overnight.
Oh, and don't even get me started on multicast!
The strength of dd is its simplicity. It does nothing but reading and writing data. You can read data from a device and store them in a file. Then you can compress that file.
/some/place/winxp_backup_current.raw.gz
To do it on the fly:
dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=1048576 | gzip -c >
An 8Gig-Partition should give you a compressed backup-File of about 3 Gigs.
This you can store on a large partition, split and store on several CD-Rs or mail it to your granny.
Splitting is quite easy too, you can tell dd to read a certain part of the partition.
To restore the backup, just uncompress the file, then use dd to read the file and write the data back to the partition.
I use this for backups of my WinXP-Partition (which I use solely for gaming). It works so well I have no intentions of looking for another solution.
Still, if you have other needs, this might not be for you.
Pros:
- simple
- reliable
- scriptable (like everything on the command line)
Cons:
- a few minutes downtime for the backup, I don't think there is a way to do this reliably while Windows is running
- no flashy bits, like looking at what's inside the backup without actually extracting it
The GX260's/270's use SATA and Ghost won't even start up with it unless you disable a resource. In this case I use a switch ghost.exe -fni to disable the IDE bus. Then it will load just fine. Symantec said they wouldn't give us the patch for this unless we have the ulta-super dooper support license for them. Which is rediculous provided we just bought version 7 from them.
Using Disk-Image Copying in Microsoft Windows Deployment.
If you are considering imaging a drive, you should seriously read that paper. If you don't, then you open up a whole bunch of security breaches as you'll end up with duplicate Security Identifiers. Joe could acess Sue's file if they both have the same SID!
howdy hoes
I have used an HP parallel port backup unit with "disaster recovery" (HP Colorado 14GB drive) to move an installation from one machine to another and to install on a set of new PCs. Most of those portable backup hardware solutions offer a "disaster recovery" method in ther software to get you up and running again as easily as possible.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
http://www.fssdev.com/
CasperXP. I've used it several times and never had a problem. The typcial scenario is when I or a friend want to upgrade to a larger hard drive without having to reinstall everything. Attach the hard drive, copy existing hard drive to new hard drive, boot from new hard drive. It even runs on top of windows without having to boot into a special utility.
The restore OS option is a last resort and done with a pretty non-functional machine.
The larger backup vendors Veritas BackupExec/NetBackup, Legato Networker and IBM Tivoli all offer the capability to generate system restore disks (cd/dvd) to facilitate a complete system + user data restore from a blank drive. Of course, you have to pay mucho dinero for the functionality.
Dantz are fast playing catchup (e.g. see the Multi-session capabilities introduced in Retrospect 6.5) and promise the capability soon.
I used Norton Ghost 2001 & 2002.
... I used to make a partition image once I had done a fresh install of the system. That way when my mahcine needed a rebuild in the future (because back in the Win98 days, Windows needed a complete rebuild about every 9 months) I could just insert 7 CDs as opposed to all of the various CDs for the programs. I'd then just have to run any patching software. Also, keeping all data files on a 2nd HD helped.
Both required that I make a boot floppy (not CD) and boot into their DOS program.
The program usually worked fine once you get the hang of their cyrtic and misleading error messages. Especially during restore from CD. For example, the error message "Can't read file XX" realy means "Insert next CD."
Also their CD-R support sucks. It usually dies on making CD 6 of 7, and you have to restart from step 1, not from CD 6 on.
I found the best thing to do was (and you need 2 partitions or disks to do this), set Shost to write in 620MB chucks, and then have it write the 1st partition to files on the 2nd parition. Then, reboot, to Windows and write those 7 620MB files to CD using Nero.
The direct disk-to-disk and partition-to-partition workd well enough with Ghost. Of course, you could just use PartitionMagic to do that and not have to boot using a floppy.
Other thoughts
Why not use vmware. Especially with their new Virtual Center. Quick and easy way to backup your systems, and create system templates.
huh?
Our guys use Phoenix ImageCast (formerly StorageSoft) and they don't seem to have any problems with it.
Or at least if they do they don't report it to me.
Works for me. To upgrade my laptop HD, I bought a USB hard drive holder, and did image+resize onto the new disk. Swap disks, power on, and it worked. $40 or so.
You need to strip the security identifiers from NTFS before making an image... I suspect this is what the (obviously ignorant) author of the article didn't do and instead chose to write up this little FUD escapade. Microsoft has a little tool called "sysprep" that does just this.
From the article: Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have crippled file systems
Bullshit! That one statement shows that the article writer has a serious case of rectal-cranial inversion... For the uninformed, here is MS's definition of SIDs: "A security identifier (SID) is a unique value of variable length that is used to identify a security principal or security group in Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 2000 and Microsoft(R) Windows NT(R)." They are almost like *nix UIDs/GIDs, but a little bit more complex... NTFS is more complex in general. They actually contain information specific to the machine/domain/etc in the permission. To be more clear, an NT machine on a domain is treated as a leaf node in a tree... and each file in the filesystem of that leaf node can be assigned specific permissions relating to any user on any machine in that tree (domain). This allows very complex definition of file/registry/system permissions! Unix works in a similar way, but lacks those extra capabilities. What you need to do is strip the machine-specific parts of the SIDs out before you image the machine! (Here's a thought question for ya... ever tar a set of files on one unix machine, move them to another, untar and notice that the UIDs/GIDs are, as Strong Bad would say, "weirded out?")
Obviously the article writer is an amateur and knows nothing about how Windows or NTFS work... which makes me suspect he is not qualified to do his job. Assuming you can't image Windows machines based on the premise that Windows and NTFS are "fundamentally broken" is the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard. My university must have > 10,000 shiny brand new Dell computers, all running an identical version of Windows XP... and someone means to tell me they didn't image them, instead installing XP from scratch on each one? Please!
dd is great for quick-and-dirty imaging, but I'd be wary writing that image to a disk of a different size, etc... unless you hacked the partition table to make the new disk "think" it's smaller than the image, if the new disk is indeed bigger.
We use Altiris Deployment server -- it clones FAT32, NTFS, and later versions have ext support. It works WONDERFULLY, and has desktop management tools included. Just the imaging portion of it is cheap -- I don't think its licensed per-client.
http://www.altiris.com
I hadn't heard of any troubles with Norton ghost. The version I have just came out a month or two ago and is supposed to be the best they've done. It's also possible that they are using the standard version in a setting where the enterprise version would be better. From all the reviews I've seen using the standard version as a backup tool works great. Ghosting to other machines is also fine if they are the same hardware. If you need more options get the enterprise version. Hopefully I'll have no troubles.
This is kinda ghetto, but you can always make 2 partitions. Set one as active, install Windows, and all the apps you need. Next, set the second partition as active and repeat... If nothing critical is stored locally and you don't make changes to the system, you always have quick backup if Windows chooses to turtle.
Uninstalling Ghost does not uninstall all the Ghost software.
I always use the Ghost boot floppy -- nothing to un-install. That and newsid.exe from WinInternals.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Yes, I've had this experience many times. Trying to back up the entire hard drive and it won't let you touch any of the files that are in use.
The only other way to do it that I"m aware of is to use Norton Ghost or some other similar utility, boot into DOS, and copy the entire drive.
I've done that too. Actually just DD'd partitions to files, but same difference really. Too bad dd's going to be illegal under the DMCA and the new FCC regulations because it ignores the broadcast and DRM bits...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Harddisks are cheap these days so I see to that I always have identical duplicates of disks.
For that purpose Linux always comes through. disk duplication is not a problem. But of cause if you don't have identical drives then it is more problematic.
why not try one of the many good backup software packages. I like Tapeware by Yosemite technologies. Good windows backup software will create a bootable recovery CD-ROM that will enable you to restore without first re-installing windows.
One that I've used recently that's worked phenomenally has been Future System Solutions' Casper XP. It let me copy my active system drive (while the system was running off it) off a 30 GB drive to an 80, resizing the partiton, all without having to stop anything. I did this to move from an older drive to a newer Serial ATA drive. It works like a charm, everything behaves exactly like it did before, it's only $45, and it's pretty easy to use. Probably not as fast as Ghost, but I found the interface to be somewhat more pleasant.
"Your mouse has been moved. Windows 95 must be restarted for the change to take effect."
I don't know what issues you had, but I spent 4 months doing contract sys admin work at Sun/Netscape Alliance's (later iPlanet) training center in Mountain View and Ghost was essential to my work. We had maybe 10 classrooms in the building, with 30 or more machines in each. After the classes were completed I would reset all of the computers in the classrooms for the next class, using either Solaris JumpStart for the Sun boxes, or Ghost for the PCs. Ghost was a bit more of a pain than JumpStart since I had to stick a floppy in each PC and reboot it to get it going, and then choose the image to install, etc. whereas I could reboot all of the Sun boxes from a server and set them automatically installing via JumpStart with a single command. But still, Ghost performed flawlessly. Like most of the others who have replied to you so far, I'd say give Ghost a shot.
Gabriel Ricard
g4u (short for Ghost for Unix) just uses dd to make copies, but is in a nice bootable floppy form that makes it very easy to use. I highly recommend it.
The submitter is right in saying that g4u only using ftp, but why is that a problem? Just keep one ftp server running for image deployment. It doesn't use anonymous ftp, you can specify the account to use. Just don't have it accessible to the internet and you are fine.
I have been shocked at the wide range of NIC cards g4u has been able to detect and use. The latest Compaq EVOs (blech) that we have around here have a new intel nic card that gives me all kinds of problems in Linux. I have not found a distro yet that will auto-detect it on install, but g4u does just fine.
It also lets you copy just one partition at a time.
It boots from a floppy or a CD so there is no software to install.
Best of all, it is FREE!
I have never had it crash on me, and the only time I have had a deployment not work is when copying to a drive that is smaller than the image.
The only downside that I have found is that both image creation and deployment take longer than ghost does, but for me it is well worth it.
SCO.com uses Linux
"Microsoft supplies no method of backing up and restoring fully operational copies of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. "
Not entirely true. I had an ex-Microsoftie show me how to do it with robocopy (from the Windows RK). I don't recall the specifics (sorry) and I think he might have had to play with some of the security settings on the file system first, but we used to maintain about 4 different Windows environments (NT, 2000, with AD, without, or something like that) that we could test with our software.
Just reboot to a second partition, issue a robocopy command, wait a couple minutes and reboot to the original partition.
It was fast and efficient and worked just fine. I just wish I knew how to do it now.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Partimage (http://www.partimage.org/)
Mondo (http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/)
Both are on the Knoppix CD. Partimage runs right off the disc. Mondo needs to create it's own disc, but it looks like this can be done from a knoppix boot.
I use Partimage, as the Mondo support boards seem fairly hostile to users with questions about imaging windows systems. Last time I was there the devs were actually pissing on some guy who was trying to contribute patches HE HAD ALREADY WRITTEN because they were oriented toward improving NTFS support.
Mike Lococo
get rid of Windoze and use Linux...
the learning curve of Linux is a lot less hassle than the trouble you will have with Windoze & all its vulnerabilities and weaknesses...
Geez, any camera--digital or analog--is perfectly good at taking images of hard drives. Are you really so dense that you couldn't figure this out?!?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Personally I just hate the way MyCrowSucks Windows XP mixes up the application programs, data, and operating system into a real mish-mash.
MyCrowSucks could use a lesson in going back to some of the basics of computer science and keep the operating system separate from the applications and user data.
Maybe it would help improve the security ?
It would be nice if Windoze ran from a read only directory - with no user data in it, and no application data in it.
All application data and registry info should be in the applications directory.
Windoze basic structure makes it overly hard to deploy 1000 machines...
Norton Ghost makes the whole ordeal almost bearable.
It would be nice if Windows and it's most common apps could just boot and run from CD, with user data on the network or local hard drive (encrypted of course).
If you have an Active Directory setup, and If you have machines that may differ in hardware but all use certain Ethernet cards, you can use SysPrep and RIS to deploy OS and Applications. It's better than Ghost in that the image is not hardware-specific - but it's harder to set up. It's also cheaper, if you already have an AD domain. :)
For hard-core enterprise image management, I suggest Altiris. They make a client-server imaging solution that can also do scripted OS installs, and run arbitrary code on the managed system. This is great for a QA environment where you have a lot of the same hardware and can share images readily.
:)
It's probably pretty expensive though. Go with dd if you're on a budget
vi is my shepard, I shall not font.
Ok, why the heck does this post get the mod of "insightful"? It has nothing to do with the topic, nor does it answer the guy's question. He's asking for WINDOWS backup/restore, not what OS he should convert to. Totally off topic!
Are you complaining about the ability to backup, or to clone drives?
NTBackup utility has shipped for a long time. Does fine for backups and restores, can backup to tape device or file image, and has always worked for me.
I had been using DriveImage 2002 (6.0) and liked it, except for the need to reboot to do the imaging. Acronis TrueImage solved that problem, and I bought it, but it has a fatal (to me) flaw - no ability (or at least when I bought it) to schedule backups - you had to do it manually. Also, TrueImage has very few options.
A few weeks later, DriveImage 7 came out and I am quite happy with it. It does online, unattended backups AND has a wonderful feature for me - a "keep at most N copies" setting if you're backing up to another disk (as I am). I can also set up different schedules for different combinations of partitions.
I have saved and restored XP systems using DriveImage, including one it burned to multiple CD-ROMs with a self-loading restore program included, and it worked just fine.
I do wonder what will happen to DriveImage in the future, but today, it is my solution of choice for this category.
I should note that the above details were accurate when the system was created. These details have changed (they are not, for example, still running MS IE 5 or NT w/ SP 5, etc.). NathanE can better expound on what the install looks like today.
I sure as hell don't have FAT on my 160GB drives! I googled, but no confirmation.
Blar.
I too have used many "imaging" or "mirroring" softwares including Ghost, etc. Sometimes, they worked great. Many times I had issues. After having a drive fail and needing to send it to disaster recovery, I discovered quite a few softwares that do sector-by-sector copies. I played with a few and the best was http://www.dtidata.com/.
These days, I just buy a nice large disk and set it up the way I want it... software and all. I use sector-by-sector copying software to mirror it to new drives, then let them boot up and let hardware detection run, install any needed drivers, change the hostname, and I'm ready to go. A sector-by-sector copy of a 200Gb drive takes 1.25 hours for the full drive when both are connected to a Promise UATA 166 card.
I hate to echo what has already been said, but this needs to be hammered home:
Why not give up that overpriced POS operating system - and find freedom and ease of administration in the *nix fold.
If you are stuck using the unmentionable OS - then I feel sorry for you, and will light a candle and say a prayer for your safe passage from the dark side.
As an aside, isn't it funny that the most easy to use and useful tool for backing up your drive images is itself a linux tool?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Image blaster was sweet though, and the server and the client fit on the same floppy. The only drawback was that I never set it up to use IP, just IPX, so I would flood the hell out of our network if I needed to cross the backbone.
-- This is my best sig yet.
..works perfectly fine for me. I've rolled out well over 50 machines using a combination of PQDI installed on a networked file server with client boot disks, and Microsofts SYSPREP utility. Never have any problems at all. It even creates (Caldera) DOS boot disks with network drivers (either supplied by Powerquest, or by .dos files provided by you), and you image right over the network.
I use this tool every day, and would recommend it in an instant, for both 2000 and XP clients.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Before installing Windows you should first boot /mnt/remote_nfs_server/windows_backup
Knoppix Linux and zero out the partition by
doing something like: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1
then install windows, then boot Knoppix again and use
and nfs mount a drive from one of your Linux
servers. Then do something like this to make
the backup image: dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=32k | gzip -9c >
By zeroing out the partition first you will make
the backup image much smaller. This process took
about 2 hours on a Celeron 900 for a 8GB partition!
I have no idea if it is still available, or how because the site seems to be somewhat abandoned lately.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
yeah and while dd does copy the entire partition, there is nothing stopping you from pipeing the output into bzip2 to compress the disk image down a bit. you could probably pipe the output of bzip2 to split to split the image file into managable chunks.
just some thoughts...
-- john
I first had problems with MS policy back in the days of Windows 3.1 and small hard drives. I used to use Windows' own backup utilities to back up to a second hard drive. When I got a CD writer, I copied the backup sets to a CD-R, and used the hard drive for something else. It didn't even occur to me to check that I could restore from the CD-R: after all, the files were there, weren't they? Well, one day I did need to restore some files, and the MS software told me that it wouldn't do it, because the files were not on the medium on which they had been created.
/etc/fstab, and boot into the new partition by using a GRUB boot floppy. No files need to occupy the same blocks as they did in the original partition. Try doing that with Windows! If I really want to image a partition, dd does the trick.
This was one of the defining moments of my computing experience. I have taken every opportunity since then to migrate away from MS software, including its crookware (= software that is deliberately designed not to do what you reasonably expect it to). I resorted to Winzip for backups, and Partition Magic for duplicating system partitions. Now I use Linux, and I am delighted that I can back up a system partition using tar, and, if necessary, restore the tarball to a fresh partition, edit
Goodbye, Bill, it was a nightmare living with your software, but thankfully I no longer have any use for it.
Anyone who experiences similar grief because "MS Backup" really means "MS Copy Protection" should switch to an OS whose authors have their users' interests at heart, and don't try to prevent you doing reasonable things like backing up your machine. A company that doesn't respect its customers won't be getting any more of my hard-earned cash.
I wonder if the original poster even _read_ the very MS article he links to. It is clear that one can "copy all the files" that Windows XP installs using disk mirroring software. The article points out that doing so means that the should-be-unique system identifier will also be copied. That system identifier (SID) is used in the monikers of system users for the purpose of the security system identifying them. Creating a second system with a cloned SID is a security problem. It might also interfere with networking.
But note how helpful the MS article is!!! The list all of the registry keys that you need to change after using the disk duplication software. Although they don't support it, listing those keys is a tacit communication that they want to help. It's simply that anyone who uses this installation method is off the MS beaten path, and shouldn't expect support. That seems fine; if you're the kind of person who thinks you can uniquify SIDs after disk mirroring, you ought to be able to support yourself.
Once again, old, old news gets slanted by slashdot and posted here as though it were journalism. Slashdot's "editors" really ought to get unbent when it comes to MS. It's funny to see how high the Slashdot team will jump to spread anti-MS FUD. It has eroded Slashdot's credibility with me completely.
Use a hardware cloner such as the Omniclone from Logicube. The product that I work on doesn't even have a recognizable filesystem, but the Omniclone copies it perfectly ever time.
Backburner will backup anything you throw at it. It's a collection of Perl scripts, thus very small. It can backup and restore partitions or raw disks, with or without compression. It can write the backup to multiple CDs. You can even send it over the network to a NFS mounted volume. Been using it for over 3 years with no problem whatsoever.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Three main problems I've found when (briefly) looking at the demos of Ghost 7, DriveImage 7 and TrueImage 6:
1. you can't backup a system disk live - i.e. you can't boot into Windows and backup your C: drive (DI7 can do this)
2. Linux/XP support - only the very latest versions (and usually only the corporate versions) of these programs can backup ext3/NTFS partitions.
3. Boot sector copying - I've never managed to properly restore a dual boot system (see below) as nothing seems to properly backup the MBR/LILO.
Drive Image 7:
DI7 can't handle any Linux partition types and I've heard that "it can't handle dual boot systems" which I can only assume means that it doesn't snapshot the MBR either.
Most people I've talked to agree that DI5 was the last decent version, but only worked from DOS.
Acronis TrueImage 6:
When I tried Acronis when I was getting a bigger HD for my laptop, it backed it up, then couldn't copy it to my RAID drive as it didn't have drivers, and I never got networking to work. When I eventually managed to backup to my IDE drive, the image was then un-restorable for some reason, which I think had something to do with not saving NTLoader from the MBR.
Symantec (Norton) Ghost 7:
I've not tried Ghost7 much myself, but a friend managed to backup an ext3 and NTFS dual boot system, but could only get Linux to work when he restored it - XP just wouldn't boot, which might also have been an MBR issue....
#include <sig.h>
One really nice feature is incremental snapshots of an OS.
And for the Linux geeks amongst us, the x86 software that does the management and image snapping/provisioning, is a very stripped down version of Linux. it's a tiny bit more clever than dd commands ;-)
udp-cast is a pretty amazing tool for harddrive imaging over a network.
/dev/hda | udp-sender" on machine with the harddrive you want to copy.
/dev/hda" on the machine you want to write the image to.
"cat
"udp-reciever >
Combine this with the knoppix terminal server, and you can automate harddrive imaging on multiple machines with a cron job every night if you want to. All you need to do is turn off the computers you want to image. Better buy a gigabit ethernet switch that supports multicast though.
I've used every one of the methods described by the author, from Ghost, or Drive Image (aka: DeployCenter), g4u, and some other wacked out ideas like getting a tftp session and dd to do the work for you.
Believe me when I say that they all suck, just in different ways. The only winning combination I have found is the one that you like the best and gives the least headaches on the supported hardware.
That's a cop out, you say? No, it's not. Look, Ghost is great--still not too Ext2 friendly (can funk some things up pretty badly); Drive Image/DeployCenter is just as good as Ghost--and has its own little issues; dd with netcat works but the source and the destination needed to be the same size or it would barf (apparently) randomly...it might work, then it might not...not a good thing there.
In a Windows environment, you can't beat Ghost. For GNU or Linux, dd is pretty nice. It's also free.
The best possible solution is for some OSS person to write an all-in-one solution that boots from a floppy or CD and works for Linux/Unix and Windows, but that just ain't happening.
You could try this, but I can't vouch for it.
Like I said, none of the solutions really work well. After all that is said and done, the best thing is to just start from scratch, taking lots of time, but at least you know you won't get bit in the ass by some random failure of a third party application that has control of your drive.
Not so. Microsoft technical support reps have several times said that Microsoft provides no way to make functional backups of Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Assuming that you have a CDrom in the machine, and an identical type of hard disk to create your backup ..
Step 1) boot a live linux CD (knoppix, SoL-diag, etc)
Step 2) # dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc (Where IDE-0 master is your windows-infected disk, and IDE-1 master is your DMCA violating 'backup for personal, educational use only' disk)
All they need to do now is to embed the CPU serial number, and/or the hard disk serial number into the kernel, and none of these techniques will work in future.
okay, I have to find this thread funny. Its inconceivable that there's no good, simple, fast solution for backup or cloning of a PC users hard drive. As an Apple Specialist, my shop deals in all in and out of warranty repairs on the Mac side. We back up and clone hard drive's on a daily basis, as small as a couple hundred megs, as large as multiple dozens of gigs. Ironically, its' all done with a freeware application. Carbon Copy Cloner copies all the resources, invisible files, and data on the source disk, to the target disk, while leaving everything in exactly the same place, and in working order. Its an amazingly simple solution that keeps the UNIX environment of the Mac working and happy, on a new drive. It also works for backing up and cloning pre-OSX drives as well.
As users of the predominant platform in the computer industry, I dont know why microsoft hasnt been forced into providing a solution.
phiber811
www.modyourmac.com
I regularly restore my Windows system. No, this isn't because something just broke; I do it as a preventative measure.
First, I installed my Windows system very carefully, ensuring I have all the applications I need. Everything is installed on the C: drive which is made reasonably small so it is easy to backup and restore. It's about 2 GB. Then I change "My Documents" and other things over to the D: drive, and make sure other configurations are tweaked as needed. Then I shutdown Windows cleanly and boot up a Linux rescue CD (one I created myself so it has all the tools I like on it). I then read the partition image of C:, compress it, and transfer that over to a Linux machine. Then I reboot back into Windows and make sure I was working with a good shutdown. Then I do a restore test by powering off (not shutting down) Windows, then booting the Linux rescue CD again. This time I pull the file back in from the Linux machine, uncompress it, and write it to disk (using a program I wrote that works similar to "dd" but shows a running status as it goes). Then I boot back to Windows and verify that the archived image is in fact a good one.
Every few times I use Windows, I simply restore that same image again. I've found I get messages that bug me about daylight savings changes. I dealt with that by restoring the image, changing daylight savings, and saving a new image so I have two, one for each daylight savings time setting.
The D: drive is NOT regularly restored, but it is regularly backed up file by file with FTP. If you run Samba on your Linux/BSD machines, you could use that instead to make file by file backups. Restoring data involves restoring the empty D: image (very small compressed), then reloading all the files (no weird system files on D:). I'd sure love to have an rsync client or server that runs on Windows, though.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've never used that feature, as my primary use of Retrospect is on Macintosh; I have a Windows client, but have not had to try to regenerate it following a total system loss. (And I don't have the add-on to do it anyway.)
But the rest of Retrospect is common across Windows and Mac. (Disaster recovery on Mac seems to be a lot easier.) The important part for this discussion, in addition to the 'disaster recovery CD' add-on, is the way it does a so-called 'snapshot' when it takes an incremental backup. This lets you get both the speed of doing incremental backups, plus the ability to restore a system to precisely the contents it had at that time. (So basically, it can handle deletes too, so it doesn't need to restore files from the full backup which were deleted when a later backup took place.)
I bought Retrospect for Macintosh after Norton 'Crash Gaurd Causes Crashes' Utilities removed their backup/restore software in a newer version. (Fortunately, the id10ts at Symantec offered a satisfaction guarantee on software. The store didn't believe it, they had to place a toll call to Symantec to find out they weren't kidding.)
I've been using Retrospect for Macintosh since System 8 came out, through OS X, and now with a Windows 98 client. It's my very favourite backup program, and what's more, the restores work.
Just need to get the upgrade to 5.1 for Mac so I don't need a separate backup system for my Linux box.
The author of the "story" is wining and bitching about how hard it is to make a functional copy of a Windows installation and how supposedly this is some kind of "license enforcement" issue when anyone with half-a-brain can read the KB article themselves that the reason it's not supported and will cause problems is that you're violating the internal security policy of your own network by having duplicate machine SID's on your network. To make it work you have to change the SID, but since MS obviously feel it's not reliable enough they're recommending it as a workaround (since, hey, if anyone could just change the SID no questions asked we'd get another Slashdot article about how Windows is fatally flawed). Had they simply put in a safety that stops the image from working completely, I'm sure the crap would have flown even further.
Not to mention that there are perfectly fine methods for doing large-scale Windows roll-outs for those who need them, which don't involve 3rd party software kluges like Ghost.
I'm terribly sorry for forgetting this. It's been three years since the conference and two years since I've touched JACAL at all (or worked at the university).
Booted Knoppix and used partimage to make a bzip2 image of my NTFS Win2k installation.
And yes, the restore worked fine. What good would a backup be, if you never knew whether a restore would actually work?
-j
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
We use an OmniClone HDD Duplicator from Logicube. Never fails. Just make sure you buy the NTFS option if you use Winblowz. We can burn 5 drives at once loaded with the OS and all user apps in under 7 mins. Our staff delivered 40 new PC to the end users in under one week. With software products it would take you that amount of time to get a call back from the tech support ppl as to why the copies are continually corrupt.
Phear The Phat Penguin
Have always worked for me. If the hardware supports it, you can have a 20 gig image blasted to a client in 20 minutes, assuming you have a 100mbit network. Windows 2000 ships with remote installation server, which took care of installing Win2K on about 200 machines at my old place of work overnight. We then used group policy to publish applications like Office 2000, so that they were installed only when the user opened a word document. After repackaging a ton of in-house applications into .msi format and publishing them as well, scripting out a ton of administrative changes like adding printers and deploying software update services which patched all the workstations automatically every night at 3am, we pretty much eliminated the need for a support tech to ever visit the workstations as well as getting everyone off of local admin status. The 99.9% uptime was nice until they fired me for not doing anything, because there really wasn't anything left to do. Note to self: Break more things next time.
End of Line.
Ghost has always worked for me with Win2K. With XP it is sketchy sometimes, but you just have to make sure you turn off the recovery feature in XP before you make the image. If you are working in a corporate environment I would also suggest getting a corporate license for W2K/XP. Also if you are in a corporate environment I would suggest using M$'s sysprep utility before you make your image. Also make sure you are making your image with Ghost from a bootable floppy with Ghost on it as Ghost will not work from within Win2k/XP.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
But that would negate my geek superpowers - such as when I can recover a user's workstation from the dreaded "Operating system not found" message by the push of a single button which ejects the non-bootable floppy disk out of the drive - after which I say "you owe me a beer"
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
If you have to use crippled neoconservative malware like windows XP, why not bite the bullet and install it on FAT32?
I for one don't like to use a proprietary filesystem I can't write to from another OS.
With a proper data mirroring and system backup policy, who cares if the OS dies once in a while?
In my opinion, the pluses far outweigh any disadvantages from loss of journaling.
And there are plenty of ways of encrypting sensitive data.
Moreover - I know, this is just wild association - as someone added NTFS to DOS, did anyone manage to do ext3 or reiserfs on XP?
Gotta say, I've used Ghost and found it to be the most reliable and versatile imaging/backup/rollout utility that I've found.
The coolest part of it:
If you're rolling out, say, 50 machines, you can boot off a floppy and then pull the image off the network. Ghost will handle reformatting/partitioning the disk for you. In this case, make sure you don't pre-register any of your software (duh)...
You have to make sure that the machines that you're backing up from/to have similar (if not identical) hardware in terms of motherboard/cards/most peripherals or ghost will freak out (for ovbious, driver-related reasons). It handles copying to different sized HDs/partitions well, although it'll complain about the drive serial numbers not matching and give you a short little copyright monologue before you can continue.
You can leave Ghost running in the background, constantly updating a mirror drive image of the machine in question (or on a schedule) -- that way it's an hour or so to reinstall if the drive crashes, etc.
It's saved me lots of hours deploying new boxes/OSes on existing boxes.
So far so good using then newest version of Ghost (think its 7) We are currently in the process of updating all of the computers here at work (500+) and are nearing the end of it. We are using basic Compaq/HP EVO 510 and 530 machines (2.4, 256-512 RAM, 40GB hard drive) and so far the only problems we have run into are the newer 530's have a Broadcom gigabit nic built in that seems to be a bit flaky sometimes.
I've had great success booting with knoppix and using gnu parted for this. It's terminal-based but works fine for me.
I usually boot into linux and tar up the filesystem, not the disk image itself. /s from a windows boot disk solves this problem.. untar on top of that.
I have never had a problem reinstalling from this tarfile. Admittedly, on a new disk, you have to make sure the boot sector gets installed, but I believe doing a format
I've never tried this on a non-fat filesystem though, so YMMV.
Tar'd up windows install saves hours of pain when trying to bring up a system with a mess of drivers that only work properly together if installed in the correct order. Almost like playing dragon's lair: left, forward, sword, DAMMIT! left, forward, down, DAMMIT! left, forward, left, sword! YES!
We use Ghost here and have few complaints. The new versions seem to work very well.
More to the point; you're already running Windows with one of the most insane-restrictive w3 p0wn5 j00 EULAs on the planet. Symantec's copy-protection, while evil in it's own right, should be the least of your worries.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I also worked on JACAL at Taylor University (www.css.tayloru.edu).
:)
Here are a few more details about the system:
The Linux installation runs and completes first, without requiring any reboots, of course. Then the Windows installation proceeds, automatically rebooting and continuing several times.
To start the JACAL process, the administrator only needs to input the hostname of the workstation, and select two or three menu options having to do with partitioning and whether the machine is to single-boot (Linux or Windows) or dual-boot.
Linux Installation:
We had a "base" Red Hat installation shared via NFS to the JACAL workstations (that is, workstations currently going through the JACAL install process), and this installation was rsynced to each installation target, where hardware detection and the admin-entered hostname were used to customize certain files. The rest was cake.
Windows Installation:
The real work was here, of course.
To get the installation files, we let a Windows installation progress to the point where it starts paying attention to what hardware is on the system (that would be the second or third reboot, IIRC). We powered off the machine at that point and used 'dd' to grab the boot partition of the drive, and made a tarball of all the files on the Windows partition.
After a lot of guesswork, trials, and errors, we developed a short script that knows which bits of the Windows boot partition are machine-independent, so for each workstation going through the JACAL process, JACAL un-tars the tarball onto the newly formatted (fat32) partition and copies the bits it will need to boot and continue the Windows installation. It also copies a chain of Perl scripts into the c:\temp folder. Then it reboots, and for the rest of the JACAL process the machine is running Windows.
Using the RunOnce registry key, we started a Perl script that used sysdiff (and other various things) to install applications hosted on a SAMBA share. That perl script would then set RunOnce to run the next perl script, and then reboot. The next perl script would install the video driver, set RunOnce again, and reboot. The next one did some substitutions in c:\winnt\system.ini (or something like that) to enable SMP, and rebooted. Etc.
Since I was there I know they've updated the entire applications installation process (SysDiff can't do *everything*), and they're running XP now instead of NT 4.0.
I know that we were interested in making this more of an open-source project while I was there, but getting Windows to install this easily takes quite a bit of work to implement; there's no easy way to just pack up an all-inclusive tarball and send it off to somebody else, especially since a lot of the essential pieces are copies of non-free software packages. But I know that JACAL saves Taylor's CompSci department hours and hours of clicking through dialog boxes each year. (Need to fix a machine's configuration? Just sit down with a JACAL bootdisk for 5 minutes and the problem is solved 45 minutes later!)
I think it would be great if more people could start to make use of the work that's been done, so it could be this easy for everyone.
What I've done for people who have needed to transfer their Windows install, without loosing anything (i.e., not having to reinstall the 100+ applications they've installed), I boot up with a Linux CD (distro or one of my own), and use cat to duplicate the data. I know a lot of people use dd, but hey, there's always more than one way to do it. :)
/dev/hda > /dev/hdb
/some_path/backup.tar.gz .
/dev/hda /dos ; cd /dos ; tar cvpzf /some_path/backup.tar.gz .
cat
For my Linux stuff, I use tar, something like this:
cd / ; tar cvpzf
I suppose it may work with Windows installations, if you have CONFIG_FAT_FS, CONFIG_MSDOS_FS, CONFIG_VFAT_FS, and CONFIG_NTFS_FS, depending on what filesystem your Windows machine is using. Try it once, and see what happens. You may find this works, and is free, rather than the expensive alternatives.
mount
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm not one of the big boys, but I image a lot of local Windows workstations (100 a year). I have never had a miss with IC3. I had to go up to version 4.6 with Win XP machines.
Ghost works great if you are willing to have your system down for a few hours while the data is being backed up. I am interested in creating images of Production Servers thus Ghost isn't really an option. TrueImage supposedly will take an image while the OS is running (a dream come true), but when you go to restore the image you have to have a DHCP server give you an IP address. Well, in the data center there is no DHCP. I wrote their staff to tell them that I'd buy a site license if they'd give me the ability to specify an IP address...haven't heard back.
I can't believe that no vender has yet to create a product that can take an image of a production server (including the OS drive) with no down time, and allow you to restore it w/o DHCP.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
A quick Google search came up with this for whatever it is worth:
s yn tax.html#ROBOCOPY
http://www.infotech.jyu.fi/~jej/NTcommand_list_
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'm at the CJTF-7 HQ in Baghdad (the war room place). We are currently using Norton Ghost for our needs. We've had a very successful run with it. Every laptop at the is base has been ghosted using Norton Ghost. We haven't had any problems whatsoever. At all. Of course military intelligence is an oxymoron. Oh well. At least I joined the Air Force and have a hell of a lot more training than my Army counterparts I'm forced to work with.
It's perhaps not completely ideal, but it works reasonably well in the experimenting I did. Depending on the drive, it can write directly to CD-Rs with compression (along with other drive types, but I've never tried those). You can do bootable CDs from it for recovery, etc. One interesting thing about it is that it's Linux-based, I suspect based off a standard distribution. Really there's nothing there you couldn't do with what's available standard under most Linux installs, it's just a question of putting it together.
Instant Recovery
fencepost
just a little off
while i've never changed that many things at once, i've changed video cards, nic's, etc. and kudzu (under redhat 8 & 9) detects that the old hardware has been removed and the new stuff is there. it will then ask me questions like "do you want to configure the 3c509 blah?". i can tell it yes and to use dhcp and everything is dandy.
problems can exsist, i'm not denying that, but changing the hardware is something that should be possible without reinstalling.
-- john
I do all of my Windows development inside of VMWare. It hogs disk space and there's a performance penalty... but I can easily backup with virtual machine. It also allows me to evaluate MS beta products, try out service packs, etc in an isolated environment.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. -G.K. Chesterton
I use win2000 server with RIS (Remote Installation Services).
Maybe because it is a "modern" OS (completely subjective term by the way), you dateless pathetic party-line Slashbot.
Or %SystemRoot%\system32\ntbackup.exe if you want, but what you want is your entire drive and "System State"
So if dd copies EVERYTHING bit by bit then wouldnt it also copy the bad sectors?
FOOL$
The company I work for has a product called PC Relocator. Sort of like a backup tool, but a little more than that. It moves applications, files and settings. There is some work to be done with the product, but I think it a solid alternative to cloning. We basically can move a user's environment from one machine to another.
right, so there are all sorts of exciting ways to make sector-for-sector copies from one drive to another. My question is, how do you prepare Windows for this procedure first? If there are significant differences in hardware between the imaged machine and the "imagee", even WinXP will crap out! So how do you set up the "base" WinXP machine so that it will detect all of the different hardware in the new machine on startup, and not get confused?
**** You never REALLY learn to swear until you own a computer. ****
I use Ghost with a Network boot disk, courtesy of Bart's Network Boot Disk.
Using the boot disk, I can map drives and access domain resources. I have a drive mapped that contains the actual ghost.exe executable and most of my images. Yes, it is a pain to have to make new images for new hardware sets, and yes, you sometimes need to modify the boot floppy to recognize some NICs, but otherwise it works like a charm.I'll have to try out Knoppix for this, though!
-- Halfabee
The best way to image a windoze box is to FDISK it and put something useful on it. What is the name of this web site slashdot or MCSE QA.
Got Code?
With last version you can also take image while Windows is running !!! This is a great product I use often at my job on a lot of production web servers for a governement !
why not just use the windows built in backup utility? It backups the whole os and programs.
Everything in the Slashdot article was verified by Microsoft technical support people.
Either gimp or Photoshop, depending on what OS I am in.
I can't believe no-one has pointed this out before, but XP comes with a tool called system restore. It restores the system, much like many other 3rd party tools, to a previous state. I know loads of people who have solved problems with this. Failing that, you can always (again with XP) boot to a 'Last Known Good Configuration'. I don't know about 2k, but this article has very little relavance to XP.
Sysprep does not make backups. It only prepares an image for cloning to an identical machine. Most people don't have Sysprep. Sysprep is NOT supplied with the Home or Professional versions of Windows XP, and is NOT available on the Internet. Sysprep is supplied with support contracts and with the Corporate version of Windows XP.
Nothing Sysprep can do makes a fully functional image of a hard drive. For that you need unsupported third-party tools. That's what the story is about.
I have really no idea why it was modded as Funny. I had nothing but great experience with dd(1), especially the version from GNU Fileutils. If you are stuck with MS Windows and cannot use Knoppix then check out Cygwin. One of the great advantages of dd(1) is the ability to use good old Unix-style anonymous pipes, so with Netcat or SSH it can really do miracles with filesystems cloning across the network, be it LAN (with nc(1)) or the Internet (with ssh(1) as nc(1) sends data as unencrypted).
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Contrary to what you think, it is possible to backup the system by-file.
A while ago we wanted to move some NT4.0 fileservers at work to new hardware. We did not like to re-install and move over every configuration bit (including backup program, virus scanner, lots of printers, lots of shares, etc) all by hand. So we wanted to transfer the system file-by-file, using scopy or robocopy.
Microsoft adepts told us it was impossible. It was not the way the big chief thought it had to be done. You had to re-install.
Being Unix/Linux fans we of course did not want to believe that. The Linux server had been moved to new hardware (bought in the same order) in an hour, most of which was copying time.
After some thinking, we came up with this:
1. you install a new copy of the OS (NT in this case, works with 2000 as well, don't know about XP) on the same system.
You can install it in a different directory or on a different partition, although you have to be careful in the latter case.
2. you boot the new copy. It will be running from C:\WINNT2, for example.
3. you copy or backup everything except that WINNT2 directory. The files in C:\WINNT that you normally cannot open will be no problem to copy now.
4. on the new system you install the OS in the same alternative directory (WINNT2). You copy the files from the old system on it.
5. you fiddle a bit with boot.ini (the boot selector menu configuration, like lilo.conf), reboot, and presto: the copy will be running as ever before. maybe you need to install some drivers.
It really works.
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.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
But the Windows 2000 CDs we have as part of our licensing program are different than the kind ordinary mortals obtain. They don't require product activation codes, serial numbers, etc. (or any product activation at all, actually). Windows XP is the same way, as are Office 2000 and XP.
I don't know whether that affects drive imaging software or not. I've used g4u to create and use images of Win2k and WinXP machines without problems (well, none that seemed specific to imaging), and I had never heard of "sysprep" (reading up on it now).
I would really like to have an "Ask Slashdot" where all of the people who say "You just don't know how to administer a Windows network; if you did, it would be perfect" get the chance to tell us where to go to learn this fabulous information. I'm used to working with Linux and prefer it heavily, but right now my job is to maintain/upgrade a Windows+Novell network, and I still want to do a good job. I am gradually discovering things like SMS, but in many ways still feel lost. If there really are ways to make all this crap behave, I'd sure like to know about them.
Do keep in mind that I work for a financially troubled state institution. Sitewide MS licensing is already paid for as far as Windows and Office, but suggesting $$$ on software or training is not helpful. I don't mind reading, though.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Wrong yet again. You're batting none for about a hundred here. Sysprep is not used for cloning to an identical machine. You can restore the image to any machine with the same HAL - regardless of other hardware, provided you can include the drivers for the new hardware in the image. All this stuff isn't rocket science - it's standard Windows stuff. If you'd bothered to do even the slightest bit of research you would have found this out. Quit while you're ahead.
Is there such a thing? Am I doomed to have to boot into something else, or use a backup solution that requires me to re-install the OS upon failure?
thanks,
nobody
Having been in LOTS of large scale deployment efforts, the best of the deployment tools I have seen is the Altiris Deployment Solution (which can be had via http://www.altiris.com/). They will even give you a 30 day trial of the product suite.
It is my understanding that there are white papers on how to use RIS with GHOST.
Microsoft will only support you if you use SYSPREP with any of the cloning tools. (v1.1 for Windows 2000 and v.2.x with XP)
I meant SUS, not SMS, as SMS costs money that we don't have.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Both of these companies now produce imaging software that can take a hot backup of all drives on a windows system.
Powerquest's v2i is a good if pricey product. I'd prefer Acronis' Trueimage server though - it's somewhat slower in creating the image (10 minutes for 4Gb maybe) but much more capable and considerably cheaper.
Both provide a bootable CD that can recover images from either local or network drives.
Cause it's almost exactly the opposite of the experience we have in the real world. So, to recap:
You can make backups of a system using Windows Backup, which is included with the operating system. These backups are not intended for being restored to another hardware platform. To restore the backup, all you need to do is install the same version of Windows, then restore the backpu, including the system state.
You can make images of Windows systems, provided you use sysprep to remove the domain specific information. These images can be restored to any hardware platform with the same HAL (so if it's an ACPI BIOS, then the target platform must be as well). Other hardware will be detected during the mini setup that runs after you restore the image. You can include extra drivers so you can have one image for multiple machines.
While the system is running several processes have locks in place on files. Moreover some data on your disk (e.g. the boot sector) need to be copied to the same sector on the target drive. This isn't a "file" so you couldn't do it no matter what filesystem you used. Even under unix you'd have to use something like dd. It seem to me based on the first line of your question that you have unreasonable expectations and a negative opinion of Microsoft.
Microsoft's advice is to reinstall the operating system and all programs every time you want to move to a new or backup computer.
Which makes sense if you take into consideration that a lot of work detecting hardware happens during the install. Despite this I have moved hard drives with XP on them between machines and had no problem booting... the system detects a ton of device changes but works.
Copying each sector of a hard drive bypasses Microsoft's copy protection by which Microsoft punishes all users, even if they are honest.
This is just wrong. If it was this easy to defeat windows activation then everyone would do it. The way WPA works is it builds a fingerprint of your system based on 10 terms derived from the system hardware. If more than a few of these change it makes you reactivate. So by mirroring the disk sector by sector then plopping it in another machine you in effect change a lot of the hardware terms in the WPA equation and it forces you to reactivate windows.
I don't have an answer to your question except this: it would be trivial to write a program to copy sector by sector, a "dd" for windows. So easy that I am sure it has been done. In case it hasn't, here's how to do it: MSDN article
You'll need:
1. PC with large harddrive and either Win or Linux/Samba
2. Network capable boot disk, we use http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/
3. The bootable version of Ghost We have the bootdisk setup to recognize the nic's we typically deal with. It boots and maps a drive to the "server" with the big drive in it. The Ghost exe is on the server. Simple, effective, cheap.
...all of the solutions I read(granted I changed to 3+) require a reboot, swap a drive, setup this and that. Ridiculous!
What do people use to backup EVERYTHING on a running windows 98SE/2000/XP box? Maybe so I can throw it on an identical server. Or god forbid, backup while it is in use! I for one do not want to play musical dvdRWs while everyone else has gone home.
1. UNIX ACLs anyone?
2. cscx goes overboard on original posters poor choice of words in saying that 'NTFS is fundamentally broken' when he really means that 'Windows is fundamentally broken' as the problem with live FS backups lies in MS's file locking design which ultimately comes back to their brain damaged DLL design. What do you mean I can't unload a DLL without rebooting? You put something that you might want to remove later in a HASH TABLE? Dumbasses.
3. The SID attached to the host, which cscx exhorts the virtues of, is ultimately useless and a nuisance as hosts outside a domain/AD with the correct user credentials can still use network services. So why the hell do I have to dork around with sysprep?
In answer to the initial poster's question, I use Symantec Ghost Enterprise to solve most of these problems. Yes, it has strange error messages. Try looking them up in the manual, and then posting them to the Symantec support group (although they are totally useless when it comes to using ghost to image linux, yech, it corrupts the ext3 logfile) If you read the manual, no, really read the manual the tool is amazingly powerful. If you don't read the manual you'll just give up on the install and load everything by hand because it'll be quicker.
I've tried Drive Image 7 but it failed to clone a successful copy that would boot to windows correctly (windows would hang even in safe mode). I tried it again and again, about 4-5 times.
Then I tried good ol Ghost (version 8) and it worked fine, the first time. The only complaint was that I had to do it from dos 'cuz the win32 version of ghost complained that it couldn't lock the drive down (I ran ghost from a different drive).
There's also another way....using linux and doing it that way.
Of course, this is all assuming that WPA (Weak Protection, and major Annoyance) doesn't interfere.
I used Norton Ghost to backup my step-father's business PC running Windows 2000.
.
Some of his drive letters had been reassigned, because Windows kept changing its mind about drive letters whenever certain removeable devices were plugged in before a system boot. This played havoc on many programs which rely on Windows to keep track of their path.
So I make a Ghost image on the old drive, and restore it to the new drive.
. .
Windows boots up, and complains that it can't find it's paging file (sometimes incorrectly called "swap file"). Hmm. No big deal, right? Er, no. Windows 2000 absolutely *requires* that you have a paging file, even if you have 2GB of RAM. Windows then proceededed to give me instructions on how to create a swap file by opening the Control Panel, clicking here and there (system-->performance IIRC).
That's all fine and dandy, but when I logged on with any account, it would immediately log me off, telling me that, lo and behold, the paging file was missing and that I should click on Control Panel --> System --> Performance, etc. to create one.
How useful!
So I try all sorts of fun key combinations, booting in safe mode, and all the other obvious stuff. Every time it was the same:
1) OMG! Missing paging file! Fix! Here's how:...
2) Log in
3) OMG! Missing paging file! Fix! Here's how:...
4) Insta-logoff.
For some odd reason known only to Microsoft, you can't reasonably edit the registry of another machine simply by plugging in its hard drive. No, this would render system recovery "insufficiently challenging."
So, I asked a Microsoft programmer I know for what to do. He suggested I edit it with the remote registry editor. Okay, that service isn't running. (Run a remote registry editor service... on a Microsoft workstation containing important business information? Uh, no?)
(note I tried this with a machine in the same situation later, and the Windows system refused to let anything talk to it outside of pinging and a few other things)
So, then the Microsoft programmer suggested I boot into console mode and... Uh, oh wait, Microsoft doesn't provide any utilities that can correct this that aren't GUI-based.
Then, I kid you not, he recommended I edit the registry file--in binary--using Debug. MmmHmm. Sure. While this would be tough even with the registry file spec, Windows, being a closed-source OS, doesn't have public documentation regarding the details of their binary registry format. Were this nearly any other OS, including previous Microsoftware like DOS/W3.1, this info would probably be stored in a human-readable text file, but I digress.
So after consulting with a few other people, I ended up reinstalling Windows, about 70 applications, applying the 11 registry tweaks I normally do, and changing various odd system settings to the "Sane" setting.
Seeing as how Windows 2000 does a full surface scan on the drive whether you want it to or not, and how installing and applying all of the needed updates requires rebooting no less than five times, this basically shot my entire day. I had to take a day off of work because this system was needed for business use that day. Fortunately, we had a backup of all his data.
This is one of many examples I have that prove to me time and time again that Windows is not a sane server OS, never was and never will be.
Some people may point out that Windows NT-based OSes link "C:", "D:" to devices just like Unix. That's all fine and dandy too, except that applications, including Windows itself rely on those arbitrary drive letters, whose ID is written to each drive's MBR for some reason, rather than in a centralized and readable location.
No better way to spend one's day...
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Hello. I'm fairly new to slashdot, and I have all of these moderator points I don't know what to do with. I would like to mod down the post I just read as -1 Troll. It was posted by Cliff and titled "Experiences w/ Drive Imaging Software?". Thanks for the help.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
Never heard of it. Do you mean PC Magazine?
Since the poster wants to make backups, why is he investigating drive imaging software?
He's looking for bare metal backup recovery...
Legato Backup exec might do the trick
Depending if your ntfs system uses encryption, a good knoppix cd might be all that's needed however
I have been making System Images for deployment of Windows 2000 and Windows XP for the last 2 years at my place of employment. Using Ghost Version 7.5 which fully supports NTFS I have never seen a single problem when imaging a Hard Disk.
...so that when Sysprep first boots the image it doesn't panic when it doesn't know what to do with the IDE controller.
For these System Images we use Sysprep to prepare the Image for use on a very broad range of Hardware. At this point I have 2 Windows 2000 Images - one for Laptops, one for Desktops, and 1 Windows XP image that works on both Laptops and Desktops.
You can also use Sysprep to move an Existing Windows installation to a completely different piece of hardware, provided you take steps to ensure the drivers for the IDE Controller are known to Sysprep. This generally involves adding a section to the SYSPREP.INF similar to this:
[SysprepMassStorage]
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7111="%windir%\inf\mshdc.inf"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7199="%windir%\inf\mshdc.inf"
All in all Ghost+Sysprep seems to be a very good solution when creating images of Windows systems, and one that has served me very well for the last few years.
Windows ships with a utility that backs up the system, either to tape or to file. These can be used to make full DR backups, but they can only really be restored to identical hardware. To restore the backup, Windows first needs to be installed (only Windows, no apps). Then the restore is done - filesystem & system state. Then a reboot, and you're back to where you were when the backup was run. How do you think Windows admins backup their servers?
If he wants to make images, Microsoft supports this as well. They ship a thing called RIS with Windows 2000 Server that lets you deploy images to hardware using PXE boot. You can deploy the images to any piece of hardware that has the same HAL, other drivers just need to be included in the image. A mini setup runs once the image has been restored that redetects hardware, and installs drivers for those bits that are new. The only thing is that you have to remove the domain specific information before you create the image - and Microsoft provides a tool to do this called sysprep (and also riprep).
Really, this is basic stuff, and should be pretty easy to figure out if some research is done. Still, why research when you post an article to Slashdot and appear an utter fool?
Just won't go into the Symatec Ghost boot console maybe because of the inbuilt Intel Gigabit adapter? It just hangs while loading ghost.exe, do I have to pass in any special switches to ghost.exe? Thanks
Sysprep and its documentation can be found in \support\tools\deploy.cab on the Windows XP CD.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
I've use Paragon Drive Backup. They have a regular verison for $60 and and enterprise 10 User version for $150+ that allows you backup over the network. For me it has worked very well. It can run as Windows or DOS based. The images can be restored to different size and different types (IDE/SCSI) of disks.
I use it to reimage test boxes in my QA lab daily. I also use to backup other specialized servers so we have a baseline to start with rather than reload the machine then restore from tape. Its been good for sale person laptops because they always get fucked up and filled with crap after three months. It takes about 1/2 hour per GB of data over the network. It take about 1/2 to restore a lean windows 2000 test box and only about 6-7 minutes to do a windows 98 test box. It has been invaluable for install testing when you need to be positive you have a clean environment. It also has an SID changer that allows you to change the SID. I have 4 matched test boxes that I interchange different OS images on. XP doesn't give me any trouble restoring to the same box. However when I move the image to a different matched box it whines that it needs to be reregistered (I'm guessing the different MAC address is enough to throw it off). The other good points is that it works with linux. I have backup up ext2 and reiser file systems. Reisier seems to go very slow though. Paragon claims it can backup any type of partition by going sector to sector. I have had trouble restoring a SCO partition because sco keeps track of hard drive cylinder values in it kernel config (just another reason SCO sucks). So with SCO the restore worked but it failed to boot correct when moved to a different disk. This is not an issue with windows/linux. You can also resize the files system to be larger. They also have a image mount program that allows you to mount NTFS/FAT to you can pull individual files. It can create/modify and delete partitions. It can create hidden partitions so you have more that 4 partition to a drive. The new version 6.0 claims it can burn images direct to cdr/dvdr.
Now the bad, their support is sucky. It took them 3 weeks to answer a simple qustion via email. Also there doesn't seem to be any organized user community. Also its sometimes difficult to get the client and master part to find each other over the network. Works fine if on the same hub but sometimes doesn't if spanning a couple of hubs. The network backup relies on bootable DOS floppies . The network can be IPX or packet (TCP/IP). Problem is, not all cards have packet drivers. The box that have 3com, intel and xircom cards and not problems Obscure and newer cards make not have DOS packet drivers and I'm not about to have IPX on my network. For some odd/unsupport cards you can get free drivers from Crynwr http://www.crynwr.com/
So all in all it a product I've been happy with and can recommend because it has paid for itself many times over in the time it has saved me.
Windows backup cannot make fully functional copies of the Windows OS drive. This has been verified many times by Microsoft technical support personnel. There is nothing provided with the file system or with most copies of Windows XP (Professional and Home) that can make fully functional copies of the OS drive.
I'm not sure why this is modded "Funny" but I have never had this issue. I've sysprepped machines many times under Win XP and Win 2000 and never rendered it non-bootable.
this sig deleted by another sig
What you really need, CaptainSuperBoy, is a tranquilizer, not backup software.
the (obviously ignorant) author...Bullshit! That one statement shows that the article writer has a serious case of rectal-cranial inversion...Obviously the article writer is an amateur and knows nothing about how Windows or NTFS work
Let it never be said that the Windows world lacks the "RTFM!" attitude that the Unix world is famous for...
I think if the guy knew all that he needed to know, he wouldn't be asking Slashdot.
We use novell's zenworks for client imaging... In some cases, it even compressed higher and faster than ghost! Granted, it takes forever to download the image back to the client, but considering that you can integrate an imaging policy with in your directory service, you end up with lots or possibilities....
I find that I'm getting spoiled by the goodies of Linux as an Admin.
Windows locks files that are open. Linux creates references to open files.
What does that mean?
On Linux, I can update a script or command that's busy running, right on a production system, while 100 people are busy using that very command. The changes have no effect on running copies, and the updated script/command takes effect the next time somebody wants to use it. The result is a seamless and magical upgrade that just sortof "appears" before the end user.
Can't do that on Windows.
On Linux, I can do a full system backup, and include every file in the state its in as of the moment of the backup, even if it's being edited, or is in some way open for editing.
Can't do that on Windows.
These are *critical* functions - backups, updates, and the like. You can probably well imagine the pain of shutting down 100 people on a Windows server so that you can make a minor script update - many of you don't have to imagine!
Man I'm glad I jumped the MS ship...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I use my machines for desktop purposes...and Windows is still the winner on the desktop. So...you haven't impressed me with your l33t Linux filesystems reference...
Blar.
Personally, I like Ed Norton Ghost - It beats the crap out of itself and then starts fights between the other filesystems installed in the system.
NTFS has a feature known as multiple data streams, that causes serious headaches when backing up to a non-NTFS filesystem.
The stream name identifies a new data attribute for a file, and a handle can be opened to each data stream. Each data stream has separate opportunistic locks, file locks, and sizes, but common permissions.
When you copy an NTFS file to a non-NTFS volume, data streams and other attributes are lost.
An example of an alternate stream:
somefile.txt:streamdata
A library of files might exist where the files are defined as alternate streams, as in the following example:
library.txt:file1
library.txt:file2
library.txt:file3
You can create and experiment with data streams at the command prompt with commands such as:
Create a file named tempfile.txt and store the word "text" in a data stream named "stream"
echo text>tempfile.txt:stream
write out the normal contents of tempfile.txt
more<tempfile.txt
write out the data stream of tempfile.txt
more<program:source_file
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. ~A. Perlis
Wow! How'd they manage to make it that easy?
Those engineers at Microsoft really know how to make our job a breeze!
This is an old version, that may not work with Windows XP. However, thanks, I didn't know about it.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/newsid.sh tml
Free as in beer. Specify a SID, randomly generate a SID or clone SID a SID anyone? I've successfully used this utility to restore functionality to an NT server that had gone belly-up by copying the data files to another server, changing the name of the server and specifying the same SID.
Theres a lot of room to play with NT/XP/2K security with a proggy like Newsid.
-dameron
Novell Zenworks does a pretty good job of imaging Windows, it's basically a small Linux distro. You still have to run sysprep and all that to really make it run right. That's Windows fault though not Novells you'd have to run sysprep no matter what you used. Only problems I've had with it is that it uses a older kernel that doesn't support some of the network cards I had.
i have been using last years model of ghost using the dos client 1 file no install clones ntfs fine, 90% of the time it doesnt fail (glares at the screwball pos running winblows setup behind him) ive got about 15 configurations for different machines stored on a 20gig full software install for everything we use, just have to change the network name, when making the images i use the -split option which makes a spanned image perfect for cd's, so when joe somewhere else needs to reinstall a machine its 3 cd's #1 bootable with ghost and a long switch string in the autoexec.bat file so he doesnt have to touch crap except the reset button when finished, ive also used the enterprise ed and multicast upwards of 60 computers at a time.
soo
Dos client doesnt screw up as bad or as often
Flexability
And i dont have to drive to Texas becuase someone screwed up 2k
I still use PowerQuest DeployCenter 5.0 at work. We have a small testlab of desktop computers and around 60 GB of compressed images of Windows operating systems served fra a central computer.
Having a permanent partition for DOS on the clients, it is very fast to restore an image from the network. A bit of tweaking the TCP/IP networking in DOS was needed to get good performance. Tuning some TCP settings, especially TCPWindowSize, improved performance bigtime.
So I'd still recommend PowerQuest as a good product, though I can understand people not wanting to invest in PowerQuest products when I read about Symantec buying PowerQuest.
I never thought it could happen to me. I was in the office backing up the companies accounting
software, using Norton Ghost, when Cindy walked in wearing that little red dress she has.
Cindy is so hot, I've never had the guts to ask her out. She walked up to me and...
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Ok, well free as in beer anyway. I used it to back up a dying drive and reimage it to a working one.
http://www.xxclone.com/
Same folks who make xxcopy.. dunno, never used it, seems kinda neat.. in a nasty windows kinda way.
It gets worse if you try to install a new hard disk and then use something like Maxtor's imaging software to move your Win OS from the old drive over to the new. What invariably happens is that certain critical system files don't make it through the transfer. I did this last month, only to find Windows Update no longer worked on my machine. I actually made it all the way up to Msft. Tier 3 tech support (the people who actually know how to fix stuff), and was told they'd had many reports of problems after imaging from a third-party ap. I ended up having to do an in-place upgrade (two, actually). Windows Auto Update still doesn't work, but I can download updates from the WU web site no prob. BEWARE!
...because you never know who you're dealing with.
You seem to be using the terms backup and image interchangeably. I attribute this to the same dim wit that led you to the conclusion that "Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have crippled file systems." For actual backups I would recommend the backup tool which is included with windows, or one of the many 3rd party tools such as BackupExec. If you are more interested in using some kind of system image to automate installations and roll out, Microsoft supports this through the use of remote installation services. I might suggest cracking open the documentation to windows or taking a look at the resource kit. It's amazing what you will find in there.
Instead of asking the morons on Slashdot how to put together some half assed solution to your problems you might want to confider doing some real research. Most of the people who have so many problems dealing with windows systems are the very same ones who insist upon dealing with them in the same exact way they deal with Unix and constanly bitch about how their nigger-rigged solution doesn't fly. If the Unix solution doesn't work it must be broken right. Seriously, take a look at some of the documentation and start acting like a professional.
I used cp -ax / /mnt/newdisk a number of times successfully with ext2, ext3 and reiserfs; works fine, but a bit slow.
we are using HDCopy here and it works pretty well, give it a try
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
About 6 months ago, I bought a new HD. I decided to split it into separate partitions, one for OS, a big one for Data. I cleaned off my old HD so that I could put images on it.
:)
Once I got XP running and set up the way I liked it, I made an image. I installed a firewall and some other necessary programs, made another image. Added all the accessory programs I like, made an image.
Then I tried to install a major IDE. The installation hosed up at 99%. After a reboot, the machine was F'd up big time. I restored the image I had made just before starting the installation. Then I tried installing the IDE again and it worked perfectly. My machine has been running great ever since, and the IDE works just fine. Needless to say I also have an image with the IDE installed
TrueImage certainly saved me loads of time reinstalling my OS, configuring it, and installing all the programs I like. Not only that, but since I can cut an image of the OS while running it, making new images is a piece of cake. Booting from a disk to make an image now feels practically prehistoric. But the greatest thing about it is that its cheap, unlike certain other image software.
So I vote for Acronis.
It may not be an ideal corporate solution - I think Ghost is probably still the best for that. Its got automation, networking, pretty much everything you could want in image software. Except, perhaps, ease of use and low cost.
For personal use though, I'd argue Acronis is the way to go for MS OS.
Personal Soapbox section:
When you set up a new machine, make a separate partition for data and OS! It'll save you a lot of time because making OS images is fast and easy, and you can restore your OS without having to worry about losing data. The data partition can be backed up via more conventional means. Copy important data to CD or tape, or whatever other backup solution you want to pursue - but image your OS. I'd never set up a new machine any other way.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
It sounds like your problem isn't really about which product to pick, but rather about the "nonspecific error messages" you have been recieving.
Here's my hints to avoid this in all sector dupe packages:
#1: Is your drive defragmented? A defragmented hard drive is easier to dupe than frag'd one, and compresses better too!
#2: Are your sectors clean? Try Eraser (http://eraser.sf.net). It will clean out many FS clogs.
#3: Are your boot time files defragmented? Try the System Defragger from www.sysinternals.com
#4: Is your system on FAT? If not, convert to NTFS!
#5: Is there at least 10-20% free disk space?
The above 5 are good hard disk maintenance for any NT2KXP user/admin, but do come in handy in making quick painless ghosts.
The next few might explain away your actual copy modes:
#1: Make sure your Ghost/whatever boot disk is running Windows 98SE DOS - just the boot! You shouldn't boot using the 98SE full startup disk!
#2: Make sure you don't have any disk management software running on your disk! No NTFS4DOS either! Straight Vanilla DOS Boot!
#3: If using a DOS network boot, you are better off using a DOS boot disk created on a NT Server. Also, you are obviously better off with 3Com 905 based NIC's.
#4: K.I.S.S. : IF you are crashing doing network images, attach a local hard drive. IF you are crashing doing CD burns, attach a local hard drive. IF you are crashing using a local hard drive, remove the system drive and image it on a third computer!
#5: Keep that old Pentium II running Windows 98SE! Imaging in a dos box on 98SE is more secure than on DOS boot disks. You overcome the file system issues (DOS has a problem with HUGE files), networking problems and image verification when the system doing the backups IS not the system being backed up.
AND OF COURSE: RTFM! There are advanced features in Ghost that allow you to place a boot partition on a box, so that you can wake up the computer in the middle of the night, boot from that partition, and replicate itself to a server. There is also the capibility to boot over PXE and boot a system without ever using the hard drive! In these circumstances, the programs running will have unlimited access to the hard drive because it didn't boot the system.
Good luck, and may the force with you.
This is Windows 2000 Sysprep Tool 1.1. The latest version is 2.0, apparently. This is not available on the Internet, apparently.
Sysprep only 1) changes the SID, and 2) sometimes helps with IDE drivers. Sysprep does NOT make backups, as some seem to imply.
I haven't used it, but judging from Microsoft's documentation, NewSID from Sysinternals may be better. Microsoft says that SIDs can become unsynchronized so that Sysprep cannot fix them.
A whole stack of Gentoo boot cds. Place in drive.
/var ./partimag
s html) but that's trivial and quite fast on modern hardware, and the program can be included on the m odel machine.
Boot.
(modprobe tulip (or xxx) if you have too)
dhcpcd
cd
wget http://server/partimag (binary for platform)
chmod u+x partimag
As log as you have a box to act as a server with enough space on it, it'll produce a compressed image that works fine for NT/XP/2K. I suppose you could do this with things like Knoppix, or build your own boot cd, but the Gentoo live cd boots very quickly and has had drivers for every network card I've tried to use. You have to specify a new SID for each machine MS box (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/newsid.
We used Imagecast for a few years, and we tried Bootit NG too, (which is fine, but costs money and has a quite a few steps to get an image out right, but is a fine partitioning tool with a decent GUI if you need that) but partimage is probably going to do us for a while.
-dameron
Heh, last time I did this to a Win98 system, I disabled virtual memory, rebooted into linux via a cd, tar'd the windoze partition up to a network share, then switch drives, format/initialize the mbr, restore the tarball onto the new hard drive.
dd works if you aren't switching drives, but if you go to a bigger drive, it will leave you with a partition table that looks like the older (smaller) drive and you have to go fix it.
The sales literature "wow'd" me.
Hardware Independent. Allows one to define say, "Windows 2000 Sales Force Configuration". Slices out applications and drivers from OS and libraries them. Hence, new hardware comes in, 10 IBM ThinkPads, 15 Dell Dimensions, 10 ThinkVistas. Each has different NICs, modems, USB, etc.
ImageUltra "slipstreams" the drivers and applications based on hardware configuration. One image, multiple hardware.
I recall being very impressed at a demo. I think it was limited to IBM hardware at the time, but it was being licensed, in fact, it may be the basis for PowerQuest's product. ImageUltra is free for use on IBM hardware (of course), nominal licensing for non-IBM hardware if I recall as well. There is an enterprise product too, ImageUltra Builder. Check it out at: http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/think/thinkvantagetech/im ageultra.htm
I'm using XP's backup sofware to backup my entire system to a removeable hard drive. My only problem is that to get a complete backup the utility wants to create a bootable floppy and with only one bay I can have the extra hard drive in it OR the floppy drive, but not both.
Suggestions?
Norton Ghost works just fine with XP to either make an entire drive image to store on a backup hard drive, or it will burn CDR/DVDR(s) for you depending on how much stuff you have. I know PowerQuest has some similar software that does the same thing.
Sysprep does NOT deploy anything, even though Microsoft says it does. Sysprep is used with separate hardware or software for making drive images.
Also, in the original article, I did not mention other software for making drive images: Altiris RapiDeploy, and Innovative Software's ImageCast.
Thanks for the link to Sysprep 2.0. I had done a search, and not found anything.
It's free, open source and the Linux-NTFS developers say it's reliable: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/man/ntfsclone.ht ml
If the computers have been used for a while I would check the memory and HDD to make sure they are not defective as this can cause random errors in just about everything. I have never had problems with norton ghost except when the machine has some kind of defective hardware
Sysprep is used, but it does not do cloning. That's what the Slashdot article is about: How do you clone the resulting image? What is your best method for doing this?
Sysprep does NOT do imaging. The Slashdot question is: What is your best method of doing imaging?
Do you have a link to the "ZD Mag" article? When was it published? Is it this: Backup & Recovery
I've had luck using this live cd-- http://www.sysresccd.org/ You can boot off of it and take an image from an existing computer, image it to a network drive, and then boot a new/broken machine and image it right off the network. A nice piece of work.
I've used it in a windows environment to image a Win2k machine to a smb share and then back to a machine that had a crashed hard drive. Worked great. It's got a gui and a curses based interface so you can choose what you like best. Most of the tools (like dd and parted, of course) you want are on there.
http://www.sysresccd.org/
We have no problem using Imagecast or Ghost.
None, zero, no problems
pray that you are able to restore the same exact hardware, or you will likely run into problems with your hardware after you restore.
This was especially a problem in NT4. Maybe they've fixed it 2K and 2K3.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
This is all offtopic. The Slashdot story asks which third-party tool do you use for drive imaging.
I bought a copy of NTI Backup Now I found cheap at a computer show.
I tried to use it to make an image backup of my C: drive. The thing does two CD's worth, gets near the end, then stops, saying backup finished with write errors!
Even DOS had "Abort, Retry, Ignore" capability! These morons at NTI don't simply tell you the CD has write problems, eject it, put in a new one and keep going?
This piece of crap doesn't even tell you how many CDs you'll need to back up the data!
And this a company that also produces a CD BURNER SOFTWARE!! The engine of which is IN their backup software! They don't know the fucking media is not reliable???
So now it's back to freeware backup utilities that have more capability (except the one that's really needed - to back up directly to CD - for that, I have to go back to my Nero Burning ROM.)
I downloaded the documentation for BackupMyPC (which used to be Veritas Backup Exec for the desktop) and it doesn't seem to be much more flexible or user-friendly.
Somebody get their head out of their ass and write some backup software that makes sense.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
For everyone who reads this, here is a link to Microsoft's article about RIS: Designing RIS Installations.
The UI is more responsive and everything 'Just Works'. I don't have time to dick with linux to make it work with a 3 year old sound card, a USB flash card reader, or my Epson 820 Stylus printer. Linux is great for serving, but you are kidding yourself if you think it's beats Windows as a 'workstation'.
Blar.
Imagecast is absolutely awful. We use it where I work and the control console often terminates, which eradicates all currently running tasks. Also, it is entirely possible to get an image from a machine which has an error in it, and have Imagecast fail to report this; in fact, it will simply say the task has succeeded. It is also far from a general purpose program, it focuses on the files and not the partitions in every case so it is not possible to gather certain types of images. For example, it supports all the various FATs and NTFSes but the only linux filesystem it supports is ext2. Further it does not indiscriminately grab the boot sector; You can gather images of systems using LILO, but not GRUB. Imagecast is garbage and I would not trust it, period.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's an official fact. Although it is possible with third-party tools, and absolutely necessary, Microsoft does not officially support making functional backups, or clones. We use those tools, but Microsoft provides no support if there are problems.
Pro: don't need a server - clone N computers from any one of them.
Con: make sure you disconnect the network segment when you do the udpcast, or people upstream start complaining :)
UDP Cast
I've been using Ghost for more than 5 years without a problem. Keep in mind that I'm talking about the corporate version not the personal edition.
If you are using Windows 2000/XP you have to use Microsofts Sysprep utility in order to make the OS work properly after you have placed a ghost image on a new drive.
If you are just copying from one drive in the same computer to another you can get away without sysprep.
It's really not that hard with a little patience.
There are NO misconceptions. The Slashdot article asks about your experience with drive imaging tools.
For the past 5 years I've been using Imagecast IC3 which was created by Microhouse and is now owned by Pheonix Technologies.
It's fast, does disk-to-disk or multicast on a network and what set it apart for me, generates Win2K SIDS dynamically after imaging.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I like this program for imaging-m
http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/intro.ht
Works while running Windows, I use it daily.
tis only a few piped commands:
whole raw disk backup, gzipped. aint nothing gonna stop this from capturing a whole disk faithfully.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"... it doesn't matter WHAT imaging software you use..."
The Ask Slashdot question is what drive imaging software do you use, and what is your experience with it?
Microsoft provides NO support for making drive images. All the software that makes drive images has problems. Part of the problems may be that there is NO support from Microsoft. These are third-party tools, and they are NOT supported.
I've had no problems with multiple syspreps.
We use RIS to make base installations. That takes about 15 minutes to re-install win2K on a machine that's hosed. Then, we use group policies to install applications (that have been made into .msi's).
If i want to "re-image" an admin machine (MS Office, a few industry specific apps, SQL client, etc.), for example, it takes about 45 minutes from top-to-botton. And almost all of that time is hands-off.
Users' My Documents folder contents are stored in their profile directory on one of our servers, along with their desktops, etc. so that's completly portable...
I know it's not exactly what you are asking for, but it makes a lot of sense to use, instead of mirroring everything. In my experience (which has been 0 in the last 3 years or so), GHOST is too damn slow to be useful. It doesn't take a week, but it takes a long time.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Hi Gang, I just wanted to point out a couple of strengths and weaknesses of Ghost. #1 Ghost's greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness. The program doesn't work in Windows. Sure you can specify what you're going to backup from Windows, but the backup operation must be exclusive. While that is incovenient it also ensures a virtually failsafe backup. One thing I hate about Ghost is it doesn't verify the backup image automatically right after creating it. There isn't a field to type in the password when you're saving an image inside of the DOS GUI. Also the default imaging method doesn't copy the drives boot sector which is really stupid. I don't know why they would do that, but oh well. So if you use ghost and ever find your system isn't bootable just pop in that Win2K, XP, 2003 CD (if you have a cool OS) go to the recovery console and execute the fixmbr and fixboot commands. Cheers, Christian Blackburn
Relax - I'll use chassis any way I wish, any time I want, in any context, structure, location...written or verbal, I deem appropriate.
I suppose if I want to chat someone up, or coupon my way south or brighten someone's day, you'll bust a cap on me.
Your language....right.
As long as you do not upgrade the drive to Dynamic we use Ghost to image. Then use the Ghost Walked to change the unique SID's. We have rolled out over 500 PC's / Laptops this way.
I've used Powerquest DriveCopy for some time and it always results in a perfect copy, even resizing my partitions up to a new drive size. Now this is only a drive to drive copy operation, so maybe that's not what you're looking for... Just my
I would just like something that writes to CDs the backed up data. Ghost does it and it works relatively well for Windows, but I cannot use it for my Linux partitions (tried it and it crapped out on the restore). All the solutions mentioned so far assume that you are writing to a partition that the current OS can read and write to. It would be nice for example if you could somehow combine dd with utilities for writing to a CD and spanning across several CDs. It would also be nice if the data could be compressed and checksummed first. I don't know how hard this would be, but it would be a tremendous tool for home users if it were seamless to them. If someone knows of a free programs that does this let me know, and let the Knoppix folks know as well.
I've done it successfully a lot. The Slashdot question is about which software you use for drive imaging, and what is your experience with it. EVERYONE is having occasional problems. Those problems seem to stem from the fact that there is NO Microsoft support for the third-party imaging tools.
That being said, you must know how to use the program effectively. When things are beautiful, it just simply works and works quickly. But it is rare that you are using it when life is beautiful. If you have a clean source image, and you are getting a system back up and running from it, it is pretty easy. But if you have a drive that is failing, or a filesystem that is hosed, things are a bit more tricky. Yes, it does like to give some nondescript error messages. But here are some ways to deal with it:
My two cents, anyway.
You can't simply restore an individual file since the restoration process is basically the reverse: dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/hda1.
You might be able to mount the image as read-only ntfs (or fat) and then find and restore that one file...
This is ask slashdot, can it be done? What if the of=/mnt/fs/drive.backup (a file, not a drive)?
This is a misconception. The System State does NOT include the entire OS. Microsoft technical support representatives have verified this. If you do what you say, you will have a machine with two SIDs. This causes MAJOR problems. Microsoft says there is NO way to recover from that condition.
If it's just a case of cloning one IDE or SCSI drive, we have had no problems so far with Ghost. One point we always pay attention to is NEVER to clone a drive while Windows is running. We ALWAYS start Ghost from a DOS boot disk. During NT4 times, we had several base install images for the various machine types. Then all we did was boot from the Ghost boot disk, load the image which was kept on a server and then we ran Ghostwalker to change the SID of the installation. Worked fine. These days, we do not use images for new machines, all PCs are installed via RIS (servers are still installed manually). We only use Ghost when somebody needs e.g. a larger hard disk, but wants to keep his installation. Works fine with XP and W2K, no problems so far.
One tip for those who want to use an imaging software on a server with a RAID system and cannot get it running due to missing DOS/Linux drivers for the RAID controller (e.g. if you want to reconfigure the array, but want to keep the installed OS): use NTBACKUP! Yep, the backup software which comes for free with e.g. W2K. In our disaster recovery tests, it was pretty much the only backup software which could reliably back up and restore all the registry data. We have a cron job running which does a full backup of C: including systemstate each day, and that file is then itself backed up on tape via the standard incremental backup each night. So if the system drive somehow gets corrupt, or if we need to mess around with the hard disks in any other way which usually would involve either a disaster recovery or doing a disk image and then restoring that image on a new hard disk, we instead put the backup file created via ntbackup on a different machine, make the new drive bootable (e.g. start an OS install on the blank machine until the point when Windows setup wants to do the first reboot), then we fire up ERD (by Winternals - basically a "windows xp on a CD" which allows you to do all kinds of nifty stuff and it of course allows you to use the Windows drivers for your controller), quickformat drive C: (it still is bootable due to the setup started from CD), map the drive with the backup file on it, start ntbackup and restore the old system to the hard disk. This is WAY faster than doing a complete initial OS install and then restoring the OS from the latest full/incremental tape backups and it WORKS (we had all kinds of problems with e.g. Omniback disaster recovery, since we NEVER got the system back into the state it was), and you can do it even in situations where you cannot do normal disk imaging (e.g. because there are no DOS or Linux drivers for the controller). Total time for a recovery of a ca. 5GB W2K install from the point of "plug in fresh&virgin hard disk" to "log on again": about half an hour, if you already have the ntbackup file available on a network drive.
You are certainly right about the wording. However, Microsoft does NOT support the third party disk imaging tools, in spite of the wording, and those tools often cause problems.
What is the best imaging software to use? That's the question.
NTBackup.exe will definitely not work. That's certain and well-known.
I've got a custom knoppix CD image. It's fairly minimal, with only mozilla, KDE, konq, and OOo. Then I simply have a little script that will mount an NFS share and then dd an image to hda1. easy as pie.
:) of course, they're not likely to do any work at this time (or any other time, really), so hopefully they don't have any actual paperwork to be doing. :)
You could alternatively do it with something non-visual, but if it's a user's workstation, I like to be able to give them a little flavor of linux while their workstation heals itself.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I am the current maintainer of JACAL at Taylor University and there are several changes we've made to the system since the NT4 days.
- We are using a product called PrismPack from Lanovation instead of SysDiff. It is quite a bit easier and quicker to use and we can also use it to deploy new applications and system changes via login scripts without the user having administrator privileges.
- We are using AutoIt instead of ScriptIt for any GUI scripting for the few applications that don't like to be packaged with PrismPack (some applications do some kind of hardware ID-ing so you can't take a prebuilt package from one machine to another).
It works really well for us even across lots of different hardware configurations.
1. boot to ghost disk or whatever image utility you are using immediately after a fresh install of the MS Flavor Of the Month and of course all your pretty little aplications too.
:). Of course save the image to the network somewhere and put it on physical media also. Don't forget to label image with server/workstaion name and model number.
2. Make disk image with no locked files
3. Schedule backups using MS backup on a weekly or daily or whenever basis.
4. Profit = you now have a two step restore of everything on your computer up to date of last backup or a onestep process of basic MS install with your companies apps ready to go. You could also put multiple hardware profiles on the image to cover all your different machines.
I find it incredable that this person got there article on slashdot. Perhaps people who hate MS should stick to administrating non MS networks. Your hatred has made you blind to a simple task that most MS admins should know. Be careful if you go chasing monsters that you don't become one yourself.
The truth suffers more from convictions than from lies.
That's the reason for the Ask Slashdot question, to discover how other people are doing the work.
For anyone who reads this here is a Microsoft article about RIS: Designing RIS Installations. Here's another article: RIS
I've been told many times by Microsoft support personnel that there is no way to make a drive image with Windows XP.
Will RIS work with a peer-to-peer network? Is RIS only for use with a Windows Server?
Yeah it takes some time to setup in the beginning but it really works great if you are always pushing new machines out the door or doing annual reinstalls.
Here are a couple of links for those curious:
From Winnetmag.com
Unattended Installs in a Perfect World
Unattended Installs with Windows 2000 Professional
my $0.02
You may have more ways to backup linux, but that's because in linux you're expected to do it yourself, Microsoft on the otherhand has decided to implement some sort of driver rollback, system protection thingy...
At the end of the day, because linux's backup is more user controlled, you can do what you want with it, while on MS's version, it happens magically... and never backs up what you need.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
G4U will actually allow a disk to disk image off a bootable CDRom, which is what we use here for imaging. Just pop in the CDRom with two hard drives hooked up and specify the source and target. Also, it only copies the actual data, not the blank space, so makes for some time saving over a direct dd if= of=.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
The reason he's confused is this statement in the question: "If you don't have experience with Microsoft operating systems, you may find this amazing, but it is true; Microsoft supplies no method of backing up and restoring fully operational copies of Windows 2000 and Windows XP." Actually you can, just not to multiple machines - it's for DR only. That's why everyone has got the wrong idea from your post.
We were usually able to script the machine name change, but domain join ALWAYS failed. Did you have better results? It was completely mucked when we tried to push images to altiris clients, too.
I'm not imaging the labs any more, but I think the guys who are preferred ghost.
They also found the imaging speed from same server hardware to be (fastest -> slowest) NetWare 4.11, Redhat 7.3/samba, Windows 2000
Microsoft says a lot of things too. They produce so many tools that their executive tech support guys often don't come up with an answer so you put your own brain to work and write a whitepaper.
This happened when we were running mandatory profiles with Exchange and Windows Messenger. We wanted every user to be able to retain their contacts. So we built a solution using tools Microsoft gave us. Came back the next day with a fully deployable solution just in time to receive the email saying they had no solution for people in our situation.
C'est la vie, know your tools and all will be good in the end.
to use Free Software. Can this limitation be attributed to bad software/faulty engineering or is it mostly due to Microsoft licensing policy? Normally one needs to re-install Windows to clean off all the crap that you unintentionally installed while using IE/Outlook, so in this case a OS image would be useless.
TallGreen CMS hosting
This is a bit off topic but it is also a problem for a bunch of Windows Administrators (or even worse, UNIX Admins who are forced to step into the Windows world like me)
A big issue in our site is managing software installations on Windows. Our UNIX clients mount the software installations from our SAN. All the UNIX software is managed from a central place therefore, and it is easy to apply patches or perform upgrades. The Windows software are locally installed in each client though. It is a big issue if you want to make sure that everybody has got the same patches, configuration, and versions of tools. We have used SMS here but it is not of much help because it does not look like it can easily assure that all software installations are in sync. I have proposed IntelliMirror because it sounded to me like it would work just like our UNIX clients mounting software installations from the SAN. The Windows admins here told me that this is not the case though.
What do you do in your site to manage Windows software?
Thanks
I have easily and successfully used Norton Ghost 2001's ghostpe.exe program (DOS based) for both Win2K and XP. Using the "High" compression setting you get good results, and it will decompress to a new drive in 5-10 minutes. The backup takes about twice as long. You'll need a bootable floppy with CDROM drivers (mscdex.exe) -- the Sony ones were most versatile, but the Ghost DOS tools come with some, too. Then I ran in to the following snag: Windows Server 2003 (Enterprise Edition). I had 5 partitions (created using FDISK prior to installation -- 1 primary, 1 extended with 4 logical in it). Ghostpe.exe wouldn't back it up (NTFS error), and indeed it doesn't support it. So I installed Symantec Ghost 7.5 Corporate edition, and it wouldn't back it up either (have to run v.8, which requires you to license an annual support plan to buy it). Norton Ghost 2003 won't support it, either -- at least officially. However, I had no problem backing the drives up with ghost.exe (the DOS program in the Symantec CE 7.5 tools only install). However, restoring the drives proved problematic -- only the C: drive appeared! The others could simply not be seen through windows. So I tried drive partitioning software (in PartitionMagic 7.0, sometimes the NTFS format would become corrupt, and you have to change it to Fat32 and back again for Windows to recognize the drive in its' virtual memory dialog). However that software wouldn't install (OS not supported), neither would v.8 (not supported) -- though I could spend $550 for their enterprise version, which would support Server 2003. Yeah, right. Veritas Backup Exec has the same problem -- no support for Server 2003 until the latest version, and that only in the enterprise edition for $500. I found one partitioning program (www.v-com.com) which claimed to support the OS, and only cost $40. I bought it, and it recognized the other partitions just fine (through DOS). It unrecoverably mangled one of the drives, though, when I tried the NTFS-FAT32-NTFS thing. However it referred to the Windows built-in "Disk Manager", and I found that via the Computer Management .msc dialog. That was the solution: You had to explicitly tell Windows to "see" those partitions. Once done, it saw them just fine.
As such did Symantec 7.5 corp. editions DOS ghost.exe work fine for me -- without added partition software, but with the Windows disk manager.
BTW, the build-in backup.exe in Windows backs up files just great -- but only if they aren't on C:. It made exact copies of my Registry, and of my D: drive -- both restored to pristing shape. The C: drive was another matter! It wouldn't backup about 1/3 of the Windows files -- including .exes and such. As such did that utility appear useless to me.
and as such it implies that MS has no business there.
I can make a backup, fully functioning and actually can boot from the image, straight fromt he desktop of my mac using the nice new GUI they added to panther, or using a command line in jaguar.
ok, ok, ok, thats not an answer to a PC guy. All I can say is i have had good luck with ghost but took a lot of playing to get it just right.
knowmad
It's great stuff.
Hi.
I work for Microsoft. i designed an automated deployment system that over 2000 computers at MS used for 24/7 automated testing. (a follow on technology by some of my co-workers has taken this approach to the next step, so only a little of my code is still running out there, but i digress)
there is nothing crippled about NTFS on XP or otherwise. Imaging works just how you expect it to. we've used Ghost (multiple version) PQDI (multiple versions, including the 16 bit dos version) and some internal-to-MS only stuff even. All of these make and restore images of XP machines perfeclty fine.
Not only is imaging a windows machine not broken, it is a supported and tested product scenario with its own feature and test teams.
enter: SYSPREP
Sysprep is the 100% microsoft supported way of bulk deploying machines and setting them up for imaging. sysprep is fully scriptable as of XP and the same sysprepped image can be restored on hardware of nearly any type. It can automaticly configure the box, set a hostname, join a domain, setup local users/groups, etc etc etc.
I know this because if it doesn't work, nobody in the world can test visual studio.
Please look at microsoft.com and read about sysprep. It's your friend.
Incidentically, before sysprep-XP, when sysprep wasn't quite the cat's meow, you could still image and restore NTFS OSes (even XP, with WPA), even across different hardware. You just had to know what things to change/tweak. (which i found out WITHOUT special MS-only knowledge)
Sysprep for XP also works great with WPA, letting you seal/reseal an image so that the WPA activation bomb goes away.
Honestly people, ask slashdot stories should be ASKING, not presuming. because the presumptions are often wrong, and the meat of the "question" is an uninformed bash as opposed to a legitmate request for help or comments...
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
PowerQuest's DRIVE IMAGE PRO has a bug in later versions, 4 & 5 (AKA DeployCenter). Even though an NT machine was partitioned once (4GB HD) with FDISK and no other partitioning software was used, I still get "Error 128" which self-identfies as being caused by OnTrack or other partitioning software.
PowerQuest TS was useless, but comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage led me to salvation. Praise USENET!
Solution? Use Drive Image 2. Works every time.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
At a certain hardware manufacturer where I work, we have a large lab that duplicates errors and runs tests on about 15 machines that have any possible windows OS installed. We do this by DVDs that store images of the installed OS. Any language that MS supports, we have that language in any OS they distribute. We use PQDI with no problems. All the images we have are made with FAT32 due to consistancy problems as well as ease of use.
I have personally used PQDI at home, also with great success. The only situation PQDI does not seem able to handle is when an OS exists on a RAID.
jason
I call shenanigans! Ed Norton Ghost was only released this past Sunday.
OK, I might just be an Anonymous Coward and so I will not get any points but most people do not realise they can do this sort of thing to backup their disk or partition to another machine over nothing more than SSH:
dd if=/dev/ad0 bs=512k | ssh my.backupserver.com dd of=/home/backups/backup.dd
And something like this to restore:
ssh my.backupserver.com dd if=/home/backups/backup.dd bs=512k | dd of=/dev/ad0
Nothing to it really. No special software required - just use Knoppix or any old LiveCD - and it works better than FTP/NFS for my needs.
You can also pipe the output of dd through gzip to compress before sending over the wire (if bandwidth or storage space will be a bottleneck).
Check out:
http://www.cpqlinux.com/sshcopy.html
Jamie.
That command has worked perfectly for me time after time. You may also need to back up the boot sector (I think its something like dd if=/dev/hda of=bootsector.img bs=512 count=1). You can boot a linux kernel via CD and use images mounted from remote shares too!
Knoppix has at least 3 tools that come to mind that can easyly be used for the purpose you need and have never failed me.
And it's free and can help you do other rescue and recovery stuff as well.
In case you don't know: Knoppix is the leading Live CD Linux distribution. A perfect chance to test it as well.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is open source FUD at it's finest.
/dev/hdc1 / xfs defaults 1 1 /dev/hdb5 /mnt/Linux_tmp xfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc8 /usr xfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc7 /var xfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc6 swap swap defaults 0 0
The hdb5 is 20GB. I assume that I can while under Mandrake 9.2 image and compress to that partition. Reformat (and fix) the deskstar. Then boot to Knoppix and uncompress and image back to the entire disk (swap and all). Is there any step by step (the data is important) to this whole process? (1) I'm only using about 10GBlet you send it SIGUSR1 and it will report it's progress (namely the GNU fileutils version).
You could write a wrapper script around it with a cool progress bar if you were smart.
Try this one day:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null &
kill -USR1 %1
#wait a little
kill -USR1 %1
#etc...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
In the System Admin tools for Windows there is a little utility called SYSPREP that prepares a drive image for the imaging process. The reason that most images fail is due to SID's in teh wnidows architecture. SYSPREP removes these allowing them to be recreated on the machines first boot. Programs like GHOST then have no problems at all.
We use GHOST and Microsoft's SYSPREP to roll out the images on our 300 desktops as needed.
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]
So... How the hell am I supposed to reinstall windows on the PCs I have that came with windows pre-installed, but did not contain the windows setup CDs?
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
I've used lots of them, and not one of them performs any more reliably than dd. Throw parted into the equation and you can re-size yon partition to fit a smaller or larger drive as necessary.
Hell, the programs are stable, dd very much so. And doesn't require anything more than a linux system with open space for the correct drive type. Works seemlessly on any drive supported by the kernel.
Lastly, you can get the dd source code, so you can modify the behaviour to obtain specific results. Try that with your pay-to-pray disk imaging software.
And M$ says OSS isn't better..."Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Biggest bonus: incremental hot backups of even your system drive.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
or it may actually slow down your machine (CPU bound)
Also try lzo.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If you can stop the system you could dual boot,
start linux and use dd to copy the drive. That
might also work if you were to run the windows
system in a virtual machine under linux.
I have been using Ghost for around five years now and the only time it fails is when the hard drive is bad. You need to ensure you prep the W2k or WXP system for imaging though. We use sysprep which you can get from Microsoft.
Michael Merry
Merryworks
What you really need is a RAID 1 interface. Place the original disk on channel 1 and your blank disk on channel 2. Duplicate disk in the interface BIOS function or in OS as you continue to work.
There certainly is a problem here, but I don't know what it is. Microsoft's behavior is outrageous. The average user has no way to back up the OS to another partition on the drive or to CD.
What is DR?
There have been numerous people complaining intensely. However, I don't see any error in what I've said. You have talked about RIS, but I understand that is only for people who are connected to a domain. Also, I seem to remember that RIS is not available to everyone. And, there is no provision for making a backup, I understand. For example, there is no way to copy everything to CD.
I had the task of cloning over 200 machines with windows xp recently. I setup a machine the way I liked it, ran microsoft's sysprep utility and created an image file with powerquest drive image. I saved the image to a network drive.
I created a boot disk with drive image to map a network drive that contained the images and loaded driveImage.
After about 10-20min of transfer time the machine would be finished and I just had to boot it up, adjust some settings(about 10min), and It was done and ready to use, with all the applications working as expected.
I just recently deployed 15 XP boxes. Took me 2 hours to set them all up, after first installing XP on one of them. I then took the original's hard drive out, and used Drive Image Pro to copy to each new computer. I speed things up by using the first few copies as masters for further copies, so I wasn't waiting on just one master. I could have burned a CD with the image on it, but that required copying the file to a computer with a CD burner, then burning the image. The only bummer was that I then had to register the new machines individually with their CD keys so that they were fully functional. But since I had to boot up OFF net to change the name of the machine anyway, it wasn't that big of a deal.
Please tell me how to do a full backup using software that comes with the retail Windows XP CD. It's impossible, right? If it is impossible, that's outrageous. People need to be able to make full working copies of their OS and installed programs. That's everyone, not just people who have special software.
If you have a problem with Ghost, you go to Symantec. That breaks Microsoft's chain of responsibility. Therefore, Microsoft does not provide a Microsoft-supported way to do a full hard disk backup. There is a link in the chain that is not supported by Microsoft. And, as many people have said in this story, people have a LOT of problems with Ghost.
With Windows 98, XCopy32.EXE could make a full hard disk backup. Yes, I know it would sometimes re-assign short file names. However, those could be re-named by hand.
How do I get a copy of RIS? Will RIS make a CD backup? If RIS works, why do so many people recommend Ghost, or all the others? I seem to remember reviewing RIS and discovering it would not do what is needed.
The only problem I've ever had with Acronis has been copying a FAT16 OS/2 partition. I kept getting "drive has bad clusters" from Acronis and it took some massaging to get it to shut up and copy. I've used Acronis to clone several Windows (98, 2000, and XP) and Mandrake Linux drives and partitions without a failure.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
I've recently discovered ntfsclone from linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net. I've tested it. Works great. Doesn't copy null data and can be piped through ssh. It rocks..
"ntfsclone will efficiently clone (copy, save, backup, restore) an NTFS filesystem to a sparse file, device (partition) or standard output. It works at disk sector level and copies only the used data. Unused disk space becomes zero (cloning to sparse file), left unchanged (cloning to a disk/partition) or filled with zeros (cloning to standard output)."
-Johnbot
Are you being deliberately obtuse? You're making an issue out of something that isn't even an issue. Start...All Programs...Accessories...System Tools...Backup. Use the backup utility to backup all your data to tape or to another partition (I don't think you can go directly to CD - but in this case you to disk then to CD).
What is DR?
Disaster Recovery. i.e. your system dies for some reason, be it hardware failure or catastrophic software failure.
I work in a school district that manages about 2,000 to 3,000 computers. All of these are imaged using Norton's Ghost imaging system. I have never found a program so complex yet easily adjustable and configurable..i've been able to do batches of 60 machines at a time with this program. While it may be good for large scale network-type disk imaging for backup, I have also seen it work wonders for backing up one PC's hard drive.
I work for a small firm that does exactly this: Image identical IBMs with Ghost and use the sysprep tool to strip the SID. Where I find the bottle neck in deploying corporate PCs is in configuring an IP, renaming the PC, and adding to the domain. Yes, only 2 or 3 reboots but still it is time consuming. Anyone know of any work arounds? These PCs are not imaged over the network using any kind of RIS server, but rather off-site and then brought to the end users desk. Takes about 30-45 minutes per PC as SMS is also installed and configured and other misc. apps...
Use of gzip will 1. provide another layer of error detection (no, link-level and TCP-level error detection are often not enough) and 2. not waste time sending repetitive data such as zeroed-out tracks.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The backup program you are mentioning is NTBackup.exe. NTBackup does NOT make a full hard disk backup. It does not back up all the information necessary to making a bootable copy. This has been verified by Microsoft reps many times. So, you could do a restore and find that the restored copy was useless.
As you say, RIS does not make backups, either. It requires a second, almost identical computer. And RIS comes only with software that costs $2,200, if I remember correctly.
The only way to make a backup is to image the drive. That's how we came to be discussing imaging. This can ONLY be done with third-party software, for which, as you say, Microsoft is not responsible. Therefore, Microsoft provides no Microsoft-supported way to make fully functional full hard disk OS backups, as Microsoft readily admits. And THAT is outrageous, destructive, and self-destructive.
I've cloned drives on one PC, brought it to another and it works great. Clones within XP, so no restarting. The new version even allows scheduling, so I can now clone XP to a spare drive on a nightly basis. Drive to drive clone speeds are fast, about 30gigs per hour.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Now I understand the problem. NTBackup is deliberately crippled. It does NOT make fully functional copies of the OS and installed programs. That's the whole issue, and the reason for this Ask Slashdot.
I've faced this issue many times. I finally gave up and bought one of these when they were on sale at half price (CSC was having a moving sale at the time).
This little hardware wonder doesn't care WHAT is on the hard drive, or what structure it is. You can have anything on the drive from MS-DOS 2.0 to OS/2 to Linux to BSD to OS/9 RTOS... well, you get the idea. It will duplicate it to another drive, in its entirety, as bootable as the original.
Granted, it can't work over the network. However, for applications where you need to do an absolute binary image of any given drive, they can't be beat. There are larger models available for imaging a whole stack of drives from one master.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Tell them that you will switch to linux if they don't provide you with a backup methoid that works. Then you should get some special CDs that will let you image drives. Just don't violate any liscenses becasue you will be on their radar now.
the poster says, and rightly so, that a LIVE, RUNNING system cannot be ghosted/imaged/etc. Then everybody goes apeshit and says just use ghost/dd/whatever. so now, answer his question except you can't reboot the machine.
You just need to get your head around the Windows way of doing it. You can still make full backups of the system that are sufficient to restore to the exact state at the time of backup. Regardless of what your mythical MS staff might say.
Norton Ghost or Novel Zenworks has always worked for me
Using direct disk-to-disk cloning, it does 120GB in about 20 minutes. Full range of copy/cloning products here.
When not being used to upgrade drives, I use it as a simple disaster recovery backup: plug into an idle computer and dump the drive onto any cheap drive I have laying around.
The cloning software seems to be Easy Ghost in ROM, but I've not seen any problems after some 15 cloned drives.
Its benefits for me have been speed and reliability. The downside is that it doesn't seem to be available in the US but there are surely similar solutions.
hey - howcum you're on slashdot if you actually know how to use NTBACKUP and the difference between sysprep & riprep? SHouldn't you b ebanned? :-)
Vote Quimby!
I help admin a largish Win98 installation... we have no intention of going any further on the upgrade treadmill. It has been very frustrating -- there seems to be a windows 98 sysprep tool out there, but it isn't available anymore, as they want people using 2000/XP. We of course only realized how useful the tool would be _after_ they decided to stop distributing it... we do without, but it would save hours of work.
SSL Certificate
Just use a hard drive duplicator! It copies the partition from one drive to another.
I've wrestled with drive imaging/cloning issue many times on Unix, Linux, BSD and Windows platforms. A few observations:
A lot of people recommend dd but in my experience dd alone has has three drawbacks:
1) It is ridiculously slow. Perhaps due to using character devices instead of buffered?
2) It is of no use for resizing partitions when copying to a larger drive.
3) Making a drive bootable (correctly copying boot sectors) with dd is tricky.
A lot of people recommend Norton Ghost. I used Ghost to backup my notebook to a network drive until the day I tried to restore the image. Ghost insisted that my hard drive was too small to restore the image onto - the same hard drive that had been imaged in the first place. I never trusted Ghost again after that.
I've had fairly good success with PowerQuest products. Partition Magic is an indispensable tool for manipulating partitions, and Drive Image in conjunction with a network boot floppy (or CD) is a nice tool for copying a partition image to a network drive. The biggest problem with PowerQuest products is that they are artificially crippled to not work with Server editions of Windows.
BootIt NG is very nice and inexpensive but has a few options that could bite you if you're not careful. I was able to use it to clone a Windows 2000 Server installation onto a new box (with NTFS resizing), but unfortunately the resulting system would blue screen when booting despite very little difference in hardware. I attribute this to pickiness with Windows rather than a problem with BootIt NG. (So much for Plug 'N Play).
There are also hardware solutions for copying/cloning drives. I have had very good experiences with such devices. They are extremely fast and can do dynamic resizing but tend to be a bit pricey.
We do this frequently with great results using Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software on our G5's and G4's. Oh yeah, we use Mac. -)
The last time someone asked me to do this for them I got the old drive with the Window2000 system on and the new clean drive and dumped them both in a exisiting window2000 system.
I formatted the new drive and copied the contents of the old drive to the new one, just a select all and a drag and drop.
I then put the new drive in the new machine, booted the windows CD and ran the repair util, rebooted and the system had a fit about the new hardware, updated the drivers and all was happy.
Simple... forget your expensive software.
There's another downside. You have to repartion the destination drive, before you can write the information contained in the partition back. Kind of having to redraw the lines back after repaving a road.
...a browser because it stifles competition, now they expect MS to ship a copy of 'Ghost' with the OS for free as well.
There are plenty of ways to EXACTLY copy your HDD with minimal effort. I suggest you learn one and stop proving Lincoln's axiom that keeping your mouth shut and being thought a fool is better than opening it and removing all doubt...
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We use Symantec Ghost at work for handling labs of systems. For doing quick, one-off images we use G4u. I have been finding that we are using G4u more often than ghost these days because it is far less invasive, though possibly not as easy to use.
;-)
If you're just imaging one machine to maybe five systems, g4u is great. If you want to have the systems automatically rename themselves, or be able to remotely initiate the procedure, Ghost is a far better bet. It certainly has its share of quirks, but it is by far the best tool that I have seen for imaging (and managing) a lot of Windows machines.
Here's a few Ghost tips for you:
1) DO NOT USE BROADCOM CARDS!! The NDIS driver they (Broadcom) supply is garbage. For a year we had random dropouts when imaging, we replaced the NICs with el-cheapo $10 RTL-8139s and all is well. We thought it was the switches, we tried the network cales, in the end it was the on-board NICs.. . If you go poking around on Symantec's site you'll eventually find that they suggest people not use Broadcom cards. Believe it.
2) Be very careful using Ghost to back up important systems (especially Domain Controllers.) Ghost by default will try to remove a system from a domain before it images it. This can have very nasty consequences.
And a few tips about G4u:
1) Don't expect whiz-bang features. G4u is exceedingly good at what it does, and is very poor at doing anything else. It takes perfect images of drives. That is all.
2) Zero-fill your HD before you image it. They explain how to do this on the website. Be sure to not skip this step, 2GB of data can be 20GB f you don't make sure the drive is easily compressible beforehand. G4u doesn't know or care about filesystems or partitions, it doesn't care about empty space.
Try Cristie - it will backup the OS "on the fly".
Roxio also had one, I forgot what its called, but it worked fine for me, same with Ghost 6 and above. No problems, buf of course, it required down time. With Cristie it doesn't.
Link---> http://www.cristie.co.uk/cbmr.htm
I just have to comment on your "You just need to get your head around the Windows way of doing it" comment.
We have a AD controller machine that controls a very simple network at my work.
About a month ago we had a total raid failure and lost the array. Luckily (for me at least) we use ArcSever2000 and backup our system to DDS (or DSS? can't remember) tapes.
After the AD failure here are the steps we had to take to get the system up and working again.
1) Get new hard drives
2) Install a fresh copy of Windows 2000 Server
3) Install 3rd party drivers for our tape drive
4) Install ArcServer2000
5) Restore from the previous nights tape
If it were only as simple as those 5 steps. Mind you that the backup was being restored onto the exact same machine, other than two new hard drives to replace the ones that had failed. After the restore we had problems with all the accounts that were restored from tape. The replication directory were the login script is kept is still causing an error event. It was anything but smooth. Sometime soon we are just going to wipe it and start all over again.
Now wouldn't it have been easier with these steps?
1) Get new hard drives
2) Bootup favorite imaging software
3) Restore image of last nights backup from CD
When Windows 2000 arrives out of the box there is no software capable of that type of backup/restore. Why should I have to reinstall the OS when I have a perfectly good copy that I could make an image of to use later? With this type of backup/restore method, I don't even need to dig out my Windows 2000 CD. I can have the system back up and running in a third the time than the 5 step method!
Another thing, does ntbackup have all the functionality of a true backup system? Can it have different backup scripts of every other Sunday? What about holiday exceptions? Can it backup machines on the network with a client installed? What about type rotation? Can it keep a session database of different backup tapes that I can access without loading the set? I have found the ntbackup a very poor utility for which it is named.
I ran across this when dealing with out of control profiles in a large Citrix farm. My predecessor had written a script that used xcopy and deltree from Windows 95, or something like that. It didn't work.
I wasn't about to wear out my mouse hand copying 3000+ profiles across a couple dozen machines, using the only Microsoft gives us, so I tried a different environment: Cygwin.
The zip program in the Cygwin environment copies everything, given the right switches. Although I haven't tried, I bet that tar, cpio etc. would work as well.
One interesting thing that I found out about the profile copier in Windows is that on one hand it does copy the "files that aren't really files", but on the other, it fails to copy any of your Outlook data. Go figure.
Check out FuturePower's website, in particular the "essay" Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. It's a mind-boggling barrage of computer science naivete, unqualified assertions and anecdotes, and flat-out lies. My personal favorite parts are his complaints that Windows is less responsive when virtual memory is entirely consumed, and a laundry list of OS-level apps that attempt to phone home to Microsoft. Or so he claims, based on the fact that they set off ZoneAlarm by daring to make an outgoing TCP connection. Hasn't this guy ever heard of a local area network? At least 2/3 of the "apps" (he doesn't cite .exe names) poll the local workgroup/domain, either for file/print shares, or computers the admin tool in question may be able to administer remotely with the proper credentials.
In fact, I think he composed this question by cut-n-pasting a section of that screed, and tacking on a "whaddya use?" at the end. (Scroll down to the subhead entitled "Backup Problems: Windows XP cannot copy some of its own files." Sound familiar?)
It's a shame such a steaming pile of FUD is available to the internet at large. It single-handedly sets open source evangelism back ten years.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Now, to answer your questions.
does ntbackup have all the functionality of a true backup system?
No it doesn't, but it isn't intended to. With it you can back up and restore your system to the state it was at the point of the backup. If you want to get clever with it, you're limited.
Can it have different backup scripts of every other Sunday?
Yes, just depends on what you schedule it to so - it just uses the Windows task scheduler to run it's jobs. It's also scripted from the command line using batch scripts, so you can also add some wrappers around it
What about holiday exceptions?
No - or at least it depends on the schedule.
Can it backup machines on the network with a client installed?
It can backup files, but doesn't do system state. It's pretty crude for doing over the network backups - it can be done, but I wouldn't really want to restore one (unless it's just data, no OS stuff).
What about type rotation? Can it keep a session database of different backup tapes that I can access without loading the set?
It has some pretty basic tape management and rotation functions, certainly not on a par with ArcServe or Backup Exec.
I have found the ntbackup a very poor utility for which it is named.
It's absolutely fine for very small sites, but as soon as you want something that's manageable, it's really better to go for a Backup Exec or ArcServe
If this works on XP, (it depends on the disk management tools provided) there may still be activation issues. What I haven't done is to try and boot the split mirror.
And the kernel for different CPU's. And hardware drivers, such as the drivers for your external firewire drive. And drivers for your network card if it's not already in the image. And booting to an external device, not supported by older BIOS's. And additional drives that happen to be selected first for booting by the BIOS.
It's useful in some situations, but not that many.
I refuse to buy into XP and activation...I like stealing from Microsoft. In 2k, rightclick on "My Network Places" hit 'properties' for TCP/IP and pick your IP address. What do you do with your desktop that you need to script? I use mine for browsing,reading mail, burning CDs, playing games and running eclipse. Hey if it works for you, your god bless, but for me Linux as a desktop is just unneeded complexity.
Blar.
I don't build kernels, my employer builds them for me. But if I were to perform CPU-bound tasks I would do them on the multiprocessor machines in the server room. I suppose if your budget is such that you must handle such things on consumer grade hardware, linux is indeed the best choice and you chose wisely. As my workload has recently shifted towards Java, the context-sensitive auto-complete features of Eclipse-based IDEs completely blows away anything vi can do...I can hear the Emacs crowd rising up as I type...
Blar.
Here we maintain nearly 400 desktops. Albit not the largest array of machines - however, our solution works quite well.
The following piece of software by Phoenix is my tool of choice. Plus it has the added bonus of randomly incrementing the SID that the microsoft document speaks of in XP and W2k PCs.
I build a base system - image it - then use that image on whichever machine has equivilant hardware. In the middle of imaging 100 identical PC's with XP Pro currently. Full SID incrementation - never had an issue.
I just boot the PC from a floppy in my test room (there is a smarter way to do this however I havent had time to implement it) and start the image. I can do as many PC's at a time as I am prepared to buy licenses.
Big deal it ain't free - it has saved us alot of stress.
dd is fine if you keep the same size disk but with continually dropping disk prices, I usually want to restore to a disk that's larger than the original.
"dd" isn't a great option then.
Tried partion magic, but it seemed like the current version never worked on my system (always the next version up had the features I needed for $50 more.
Seemed like such a rip for how often I needed it.
Doesn't the MS activation get unhappy with the DISK serial number changing, (assuming you are a peon and don't have a corp license).
Well obviously you ppl haven't done much research into sysprep, it took me 2 weeks to get the kinks and gears out of sysprep but i assure it does work, the most important things is to read sysprep documentation that came with windows 2000, because it is more versed. Please read the section about other ide controllers because it is vital to windows xp functioning correctly. I have syspreped 2 other systems perfectly under a domain based on samba.
the article he posted suggested using sysprep.exe and even said microsoft would provide support for it?
am I missreading the article or is this a case where the poster did not read the article himself?
Red Hat is for people who hate Windows, FreeBSD is for people who love Unix.
www.putertech.net
The parent post is rated as funny because it is both insightful and funny. As happens with most posts of that nature, the funny moderations just happened to overpower the insightful ones.
/deb/hdb1 won't be encrypted; it will just look like it was.
To those who simply can't see the funny part, the bit about encryption was supposed to be a joke. Encryption is supposed to be a transformation performed upon some input data. Rather obviously, simply overwriting the alleged input data with pseudo-random data is not encryption (not in the traditional sense, at least), since the alleged input is actually completely ignored and has no bearing on the output.
why on earth is this scored -1?
It's weird. During discussions of backups and disk imaging, people become really involved talking about Sysprep, when it has nothing to do with disk imaging. It only prepares a system for disk imaging.
Thanks for the advice, I will read the Windows 2000 sysprep docs.
More about RIS, from a Microsoft technical support representative, whom I asked today. For numerous reasons, RIS is not a backup method that is universally useful, to say the least:
RIS is a service of Windows 2000 Server. To install it, you may refer to the following articles:
298750 HOW TO: Set Up and Configure Remote Installation Services in Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=298750
301180 HOW TO: Add Components and Programs to Your Computer in Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=301180
You can use Remote Installation Services (RIS) for Windows 2000 to install a local copy of the operating system to other computers from remote locations. You can start up your computer, contact a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server for an Internet Protocol (IP) address, and then contact a boot server to install the operating system.
RIS requires several other services. These services can be installed on individual servers, or all of these services can be installed on a single server. The type of installation depends upon your network design:
- DNS server: RIS relies on DNS for locating the directory service and client computer accounts. You can use any Windows 2000 Active Directory service-compliant DNS server, or you can use the DNS server that is provided with Windows 2000 Server.
- Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server: RIS requires an active DHCP server on the network. The remote boot-enabled clients receive an IP address from the DHCP server before they contact RIS.
- Active Directory: RIS relies on Windows 2000 Active Directory for locating existing clients as well as existing RIS servers. RIS must be installed on a Windows 2000-based server that has access to Active Directory, for example, a domain controller or a server that is a member of a domain with access to Active Directory.
For more information on deploy Windows XP from Windows 2000 RIS server, please refer to the following resources:
304314 How to Deploy Windows XP Images from Windows 2000 RIS Servers
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=304314
313069 Update for the Riprep Tool
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=313069
308508 Unable to Create Windows 2000 Server Image on RIS Server
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308508
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default
Sincerely,
Jack Wang, MCSE 2000, MCSA, MCDBA, MCSD
Microsoft Partner Support
This may be slightly off-topic but I was trying to resize my little brothers hardrive using XP's utilitys and ran into this annoying fact.
Windows XP will not allow you to resize the boot partition using Microsofts software. I was stunned. How can all of these alternitives exist and the monolithic empire that Gates built refuses to acknowledge the problem while secretly sliding out possible fixes to vendors such as Semantec who are now employing Microsoft's tactics. DRM, never uninstall. (Of course I recently caught Novel installing much more on a windows box than they take away with an uninstall. Very tricky registry editing involved since Microsoft does support the protocol)
If you are using any Symantec software, I suggest you stop and re-evalute any and all alternative solutions.
In otherwords: Run away!
Get rid of it. I cannot explain in this forum how many, many, times I have had to fix PC's that have been screwed up by Symantec software.
On HP swithes, enable IGMP (in the menu: 3,5,3).
On cisco I think you'd enable CGMP.
Peder
If, on the other hand, you mean you want to copy one installation of Windows XP and put it on a second machine, while the first is in place on the network, or expect certain security features, then you may have problems - and that is what the Microsoft article is about. "Copy our software and there are implications." If you are a corporation, then there are tools to safely role out Windows XP across a network. If you are Joe User, buy another copy and install it. Big deal. Its not like you do it every day.
The headline might as well be "Microsoft Makes It Difficult For Users To Install A Single Copy Of Windows XP on Multiple Machines". But then it wouldnt be quite such big fucking news would it?
I use PowerQuest's V2i Desktop to do a disk to disk backup and it gets everything and the disk is bootable - all from within windows. It also supports incremental updates to image backups. Occasionally it can't allocate a cluster - but not if I clean boot first.
I was speaker at a Chicago User's group in March and one of the PowerQuest technical folks was speaking as well. They have been working closely with Microsoft for 2 years on bare metal provisioning and making their product work under WinPE (replacement boot environment for DOS boot disks for doing system builds). For the longest time Ghost didn't have anything that ran 32-bit text mode to run under PE. In addition, Ghost still requires a boot to DOS to do it's actual imaging even though options are chosen during graphical mode.
IMO, If it isn't Ghost that is dumped or absorbed into V2i, then I would expect they stay seperate products.
D.
To be honest with you, we do have that add-on module (which is expensive). ArcServe has a bootup disk modifier. You make the four Windows 2000 emergency bootup disks and let ArcServe modify them slightly.
What happened in our situation was that about the 3rd disk the setup for windows 2000 puked complaining about some scripting file on the disk that has to do with a Service Pack release.
After contacting ArcServe tech-support they told us that we made the ArcServe boot disks (some time after the machine was up and running after we bought it) and then through the course of time we installed the service packs and critical update packages. They said that after every major change like a critical update or service pack that you need to remake those disks. Oh well...
If you can't image drives using Symantec's Ghost, you have a be a feakin' moron. I've been using it since 1998 without a problem. I upgraded to the current version and have been Ghosting WindowsXP machines without a problem. If the software isn't the problem it must be you. Looks like a PEBCAK error to me. Get a clue, or at least buy one. --Rich
They *all* work. Tip: YOU DON'T NEED TO INSTALL ANY OF THEM - correct usage is to use them off a boot floppy or CD. Jesus, can't you read instructions?
Here is an official response from Microsoft. NTBackup does not work for making backups of the operating system:
Theoretically, it is possible for backup to backup and restore everything using NTBackup. However, in practice, this is an unreliable method, especially when there are different hardware configurations between the old computer and the new computer.
The following article has the steps to do in Windows 2000. Most the steps also apply to Windows XP. As you can see the steps are somewhat complicated and you will need to consider a lot of things before doing the full system recovery to a different computer:
249694 How to Move a Windows 2000 Installation to Different Hardware
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=249694
The recommended method is to backup important data files (instead of everything in the computer). Reinstall clean operating systems and applications, then restore your important data files to the new system.
Hover Xue
MCSE 2000, MCDBA
Microsoft Partner Support
For the handful of PCs I need to backup, I have simply booted them off of a stand-alone Linux CD distribution (Super Rescue, but any supporting NBD will work) and started nbd-client. Then on my Linux server simply dd'ed the (remote PC) disk to tape. When I needed to restore, dd'ing from tape to NBD worked flawlessly.
I don't know what YOU'RE doing, but Ghost works perfectly for me. I work at a huge college campus and we re-image all the student lab computers, over 1000 machines, every semester. We face plenty of challenges doing it, but problems with Ghost are not among them.
Come on, you mean you don't use Microsoft's Remote Install Service (which doesn't multicast) to deploy 2K/2K3?
That's specifically why Uncle Billy developed and bundled this piece of shit in 2K server and demands you know it for MCSE certs.
Therefore, it must be the best. Not.
Ghost Enterprise w/ Sysprep is the only way to go. I saw some clown playing with RIS once. He must have been studying for that MCSE, because there is no other reason to use it.
Who will guard the guards?
I stand by what I said about Ghost. I'm not the only one having problems with it, or with Symantec's copy protection.
What version of Ghost and what switches do you use?
Thanks!
Hi there, I have just installed a nice XP installation and software. I ran sysprep and shutdown pc. I ghosted the ntfs partition with Ghost 2003.
If I use ghost to copy partition on my other pc from the new image file, the data arrives there ok, but no boot. Not a valid system disk. If I then boot from XP cd I can enter repair mode and can view the whole c: drive. All the files have been copied there ok. Some how the MBR is letting the c: partition boot.
I ran fixmbr and fixboot, to no avail. PC still cannot boot from that partition. Maybe the partition is not marked as the active partition?
However, if I copy DISK from image, then all is well and it works. However, then I am left with only one partition for the whole disk. That means to get another partition I have to resize the NTFS partition with Parrtition Magic or something.
How can I copy image to partition, but still have it booting. I am kinda stuck and have about 40 other pcs to install this ghost image to.
There seems to be confusion about Ghost. There seems to be agreement that the regular version of Ghost has problems. Some people report reliable success with the Enterprise version.
Still, I haven't had good luck with any Symantec products. I haven't tried Ghost Enterprise version.
Could you supply a link to the files you use, such as your sysprep.inf file?
Are you using the Enterprise version of Ghost?
What modifications are you doing to the Bart's boot disk? Could you supply an image of the one you use?
What is the best documentation of Sysprep?
Thanks.
For completeness, I'm posting this here, also. The original is comment #7463612
Here is an official response from Microsoft. NTBackup does not work for making backups of the operating system:
Theoretically, it is possible for backup to backup and restore everything using NTBackup. However, in practice, this is an unreliable method, especially when there are different hardware configurations between the old computer and the new computer.
The following article has the steps to do in Windows 2000. Most the steps also apply to Windows XP. As you can see the steps are somewhat complicated and you will need to consider a lot of things before doing the full system recovery to a different computer:
249694 How to Move a Windows 2000 Installation to Different Hardware
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=249694
The recommended method is to backup important data files (instead of everything in the computer). Reinstall clean operating systems and applications, then restore your important data files to the new system.
Hover Xue
MCSE 2000, MCDBA
Microsoft Partner Support
Caution:
Here is an official response from Microsoft. NTBackup does not work for making backups of the operating system:
Theoretically, it is possible for backup to backup and restore everything using NTBackup. However, in practice, this is an unreliable method, especially when there are different hardware configurations between the old computer and the new computer.
The following article has the steps to do in Windows 2000. Most the steps also apply to Windows XP. As you can see the steps are somewhat complicated and you will need to consider a lot of things before doing the full system recovery to a different computer:
249694 How to Move a Windows 2000 Installation to Different Hardware
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=249694
The recommended method is to backup important data files (instead of everything in the computer). Reinstall clean operating systems and applications, then restore your important data files to the new system.
Hover Xue
MCSE 2000, MCDBA
Microsoft Partner Support
The question was not about Sysprep. It was about drive imaging software.
This, copied from another comment, shows you that Microsoft disagrees about the ease of making functional full hard disk backups:
Here is an official response from Microsoft. NTBackup does not work for making backups of the operating system:
Theoretically, it is possible for backup to backup and restore everything using NTBackup. However, in practice, this is an unreliable method, especially when there are different hardware configurations between the old computer and the new computer.
The following article has the steps to do in Windows 2000. Most the steps also apply to Windows XP. As you can see the steps are somewhat complicated and you will need to consider a lot of things before doing the full system recovery to a different computer:
249694 How to Move a Windows 2000 Installation to Different Hardware
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=249694
The recommended method is to backup important data files (instead of everything in the computer). Reinstall clean operating systems and applications, then restore your important data files to the new system.
Hover Xue
MCSE 2000, MCDBA
Microsoft Partner Support
From the parent post: "there is nothing crippled about NTFS on XP or otherwise. Imaging works just how you expect it to. we've used Ghost (multiple version) PQDI (multiple versions, including the 16 bit dos version) and some internal-to-MS only stuff even."
It is an official position of Microsoft that Windows XP has NO WAY to make a fully bootable functional backup of the OS partition. That was not true in Windows 98, so things have gone downhill, in my opinion.
As you mention, third-party tools are required to make a full hard disk backup. That is a crippled OS, in my opinion.
Many people have trouble with each of the third-party tools, and commenters have mentioned. So, it is reasonable to ask which is the best one.
The third-party tools are NOT SUPPORTED BY MICROSOFT. There is NO Microsoft supported way of making a functional OS backup on a single workstation. That's more than crippled in my opinion; that is abusive. I support Microsoft's right to its intellectual property, but crippling is not good policy. That kind of copy protection punishes all the honest customers.
From the parent comment: "Ghost occasionally fails in wierd ways, which sometimes don't get noticed right away (this is really bad)."
My experience is that Ghost is much worse than those who have commented here say.
A few hours ago, I was trying to make a clone of a drive I had carefully prepared. Ghost 2003 said that the destination drive label was "New Volume", a hard drive I had just formatted so that it could be identified. But instead, Ghost used the destination drive as the source drive, and destroyed all my work.
Here's a review of Ghost 2003 in PC World: Skip Norton Ghost 2003. The review says:
"The program is saddled with a confusing manual, lousy Web support, and phone support that costs $30 per incident."
Here's another quote: "I found its new 'intuitive Windows interface' inconsistent. And Ghost 2003 crashed one test PC and refused to clone the drive on another..."
The article summarizes, saying that Ghost 2003 is "... hard to use, buggy, and poorly documented."
People learn to work around the faults of software, and they don't notice the faults after that. So they may not give accurate assessments. Software is often much worse than those who work with it notice.
About Ghost 2003, see this comment: #7480830
Caution: Ghost 2003 is apparently not at all like Ghost Enterprise:
A few hours ago, I was trying to make a clone of a drive I had carefully prepared. Ghost 2003 said that the destination drive label was "New Volume", a hard drive I had just formatted so that it could be identified. But instead, Ghost used the destination drive as the source drive, and destroyed all my work.
Here's a review of Ghost 2003 in PC World: Skip Norton Ghost 2003. The review says:
"The program is saddled with a confusing manual, lousy Web support, and phone support that costs $30 per incident."
Here's another quote: "I found its new 'intuitive Windows interface' inconsistent. And Ghost 2003 crashed one test PC and refused to clone the drive on another..."
The article summarizes, saying that Ghost 2003 is "... hard to use, buggy, and poorly documented."
People learn to work around the faults of software, and they don't notice the faults after that. So they may not give accurate assessments. Software is often much worse than those who work with it notice.
Don't miss this about the retail version (Ghost 2003): #7482299
Two or more SIDs can cause a file to be unreachable, even by an administrator.
Posting this again:
Here is an official response from Microsoft. NTBackup does not work for making backups of the operating system:
Theoretically, it is possible for backup to backup and restore everything using NTBackup. However, in practice, this is an unreliable method, especially when there are different hardware configurations between the old computer and the new computer.
The following article has the steps to do in Windows 2000. Most the steps also apply to Windows XP. As you can see the steps are somewhat complicated and you will need to consider a lot of things before doing the full system recovery to a different computer:
249694 How to Move a Windows 2000 Installation to Different Hardware
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=249694
The recommended method is to backup important data files (instead of everything in the computer). Reinstall clean operating systems and applications, then restore your important data files to the new system.
Hover Xue
MCSE 2000, MCDBA
Microsoft Partner Support
Exactly. There are many files that cannot be copied while Windows is running, or in Recovery Console.
Don't miss this about the retail version (Ghost 2003): #7482299. Ghost has apparently become less reliable with new versions.
Quote from Microsoft document: "You can mirror volumes only on computers running Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server."
BEWARE: The IDE RAID card that costs $30 uses a Silicon Image chip that doesn't work and is no longer supported. Silicon Image told me this directly. Kouwell makes the card.
Only the 3Ware cards are true mirroring controllers. Others do the mirroring in software. Windows XP does not support mirroring, according to a Microsoft document I read.
And, according to Microsoft, it doesn't work: #7476862
It doesn't work. Mirroring only is for server versions.
Ghost Enterprise and Retail are very different, apparently.
Here's a review of Ghost 2003 in PC World: Skip Norton Ghost 2003. The review says:
"The program is saddled with a confusing manual, lousy Web support, and phone support that costs $30 per incident."
Here's another quote: "I found its new 'intuitive Windows interface' inconsistent. And Ghost 2003 crashed one test PC and refused to clone the drive on another..."
The article summarizes, saying that Ghost 2003 is "... hard to use, buggy, and poorly documented."
People learn to work around the faults of software, and they don't notice the faults after that. So they may not give accurate assessments. Software is often much worse than those who work with it notice.
Microsoft says NTBackup doesn't work for making full backups: #7463612
Microsoft says NTBackup doesn't work for making full backups: #7463612
Would you consider sharing your scripts and batch files?
Michelle, a Symantec Ghost techical support representative told me today that Ghost has a GUI display that often has caused problems.
The question is not whether the problem has been solved. The question is what is the best solution.
"Its designed to deal with this very problem with transferring images to other hardware."
I don't know why, but people bring up Sysprep when talking about imaging software. Of course it is necessary to use Sysprep. The Ask Slashdot question was about your experiences with imaging software. As you can see from the many comments, people have problems with each of the imaging software packages.
RIS requires Windows Server 2003. This is sometimes inconvenient or impossible, depending on the customer's network.