Partimage - won't

[MickKi]

Hi All,

I am trying to burn an image of a M$ Windoze XP Home partition onto a DVD and
having had a look through the forums decided to use Part Image.

First problem: To free the DVD drive I tried "knoppix26
tohd=/mnt/sda3", after I created a fresh vfat partition as an sda3, but it
failed to mount it by saying that it could not mount the sda3 partition (read
only?). Not knowing how to overcome this problem I opted for the copy-to-ram
method. So, I booted "Knoppix26 toram", removed the CD from the drive,
inserted a new DVD and launched partimage from a root terminal.

To fit the 11GB partition of which only 5+GB is occuppied by the XP fs, I
decided to use bz2. I thought that if Part Image only copies data not blank
space and furthermore bzips it, it should fit within the 4.7GB of the DVD.

Second problem: Having tried the /mnt/auto/cdrom I could not
mount the DVD. OK, so I created a new /mnt/dvdrw for /dev/scd0 (this how the
DVDROM is recognised by knoppix) - but it would not mount that either. :( I
changed the permissions to /dev/scd0 to allow execute rights to user and group
but no luck. OK, no big shakes, I thought then that I could first save the
.bz2 image onto a new partition on the hard drive and then burn it on the DVD.

Third problem: After I created the new partition as a vfat and
then finished going through all the partimage menus, it won't run but it
returns this error:
Cannot create temp file
[/mnt/dev/pi05030f67.tmp]. Please,
check there is space enough and
you have access rights.
Could you please correct my mistakes in the above, or suggest another way I
could get partimage working?

[metavoid]

I have just done what you talk about using another fat patition.

When you boot on the cdrom,
Can you see the new partition?
Can you make a new folder on it?

I just boot on the cdrom, right click the partiton to change the read/write status to allow writing.
I start partimage and type the name for the file like
/mnt/fatdrev/mybackup
and press f5 and it works.

One time it stop with an error during the process and I fixed that by defragmenting the winxp partition.

Sorry I can't be of more help besides telling you that it should work.

[MickKi]

Thanks metavoid! :)

I managed to save an image onto the hard drive and then I used Windoze to burn it to a DVD.

Thinking back I believe that the first problem was caused by me not specifying a device i.e. /dev/sda3, but a filesystem /mnt/sda3 - which of course was not yet mounted.

The second problem is still there - don't know how to overcome it.

The third problem did not recur. I assume that the first time I tried it I might have not had mounted the partition I wanted to save the image to, or perhaps not set it to be writeable. :roll:

Thanks for your advice.

[metavoid]

Jubii. I love it when it works :)

I do this very often and since you have to type in the name of the image file
its very easy to forget that the target location should be mount,
but the one you wish to backup must not.
And the error you get trying saving to an umount location is not really informative.

Really wish one could browse for the image file location.

Im sorry, cant help you with the DVD. Sounds like you already have tried what I would suggest.

Happy imaging!