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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.
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'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.
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
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.
If you've got a linux box, dd's the way to go
If you don't, you can use a Linux LiveCD
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.