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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."
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.
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
Did you try booting knopix and using dd to take an image ? Simple, free, bit perfect copies.
Maybe you live in interesting times
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'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.
For backups partimage is much better than dd. This is because partimage only copies the used blocks, whereas dd copies every block.
Partimage can compress data by a factor of 2. I have used it to backup/restore windows boxes on many occations and works great.
from winblows box:
1. boot off knoppix 2. nfs mount an export that has enough room to hold the backups. 3. use partimage to backup patition(s) to nfs mounted frive.
There are option on partimage to break the backup into managable sizes (say 600MB chuncks) for easy CD archiving.
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?
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.
rembo (http://www.rembo.com/) works extremely well for us. supports bsd, linux, windows.
If you've got a linux box, dd's the way to go
If you don't, you can use a Linux LiveCD
"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!
One important note regarding sysprep; don't sysprep a machine more than once. If you do, you'll likely not be able to boot a second time. As a result, we've always kept two images of each production load; one before sysprep and one after. That way, we can return to the non syspreped image if we need to make changes and still be able to run sysprep.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
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'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).
Parent was modded funny, but the reality of the situation is that ZD Mag did a study of every disk imaging utility they could get their hands on.
Their pick for best disk imaging utility on the planet was none other than GNU dd. I've used dd several times to back up a Windows installation to a different disk and restored it with no problem. The host OS doesn't even have to support the filesystem of the target filesystem since it works at a lower level.
LNX-BBC is the perfect backup utility. It's self contained, aproximately 50M, and it can read/write to many types of network storage, and of course comes with GNU dd.
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.
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
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.
dcfldd is a dd clone/replacement commonly used in forensics work. It let's you generate a hash to ensure what was read is what was written. It's available here.
Why is the parent modded as 'funny'?
/nfsmount/on/big/drive/billsBox.image
this is the most reliable system I've seen (I admin ~ 75 win32 desktops). Ghost occasionally fails in wierd ways, which sometimes don't get noticed right away (this is really bad).
You can do it to files as well, which is a bit more useful
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/nfsmount/on/big/drive/billsBox.image && gzip -9
for speed reasons you'll probably want to compress on the nfs server, but you get the idea...
caveat: for new installs, remember to make the image before joining the box to your domain, to avoid name-conflict issues
First run this script (under cygwin on Windows)
#!/bin/bash
dd if=/dev/zero of=zeroes
sync
rm -f zeroes
That'll zero out the free space, so it will compress down to nothing when you run
bzip2 -c
But to be honest I haven't tried a restore yet!
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
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 ;-)
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).
Or %SystemRoot%\system32\ntbackup.exe if you want, but what you want is your entire drive and "System State"
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!
Or, if you don't want to mess with scripts and installing cygwin:
- Download Eraser from here. (A very nice privacy tool for Windows, BTW.)
- Install
- Go to erasing prefs (Ctrl+E) and click New
- Enter description: All Zeros
- Click Add
- Click Save
- Select new "All Zeros", go to Unused Disk Space tab and do the same.
- Click Ok
- File - New Task (Ctrl+N)
- Set up tasks for the drive(s) you want to zero out and then run them.
- Profit! (Sorry.. couldn't resist.)
This has the added advantage of zeroing out the slack space in most files which should improve compression a bit.BTW.. if you want to use this for privacy, you probably *don't* want to use the All Zeros overwriting option. If you son't know why, read this interesting article.
Yea, that may be a problem, unless one was using Debian.
Old box:
dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt
Copy selections.txt to new box
New box:
Install base system (about 30 minutes, maybe an hour)
dpkg --set-selections dpsyco to help copy configuration files from backups, or to multiple other systems.
Make sure you learn about the tools that are available. If you don't, and you screw up, guess who's fault it is?
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.
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.
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
let 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]
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
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.
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?