Cloning Harddrive with Knoppix and G4L

[patelbhavesh]

G4L is a Free/Open Source alternative to Norton Ghost.With G4L you can clone any hard drive immaterial of the content or filesystem on it including Microsoft Windows NTFS .G4U(Ghost for Unix) and G4L(Ghost For Linux) are similar.
It is a bit-by0bit copier of the hard drive so it will copy even the partition table/MBR etc regardless of the OS/platform.

I have written up instructions on using it with Knoppix.

http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/cloninghd.html


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[Harry Kuhman]

I'm not quite understanding something here. dd will do a byte by byte copy. Heck, I use it to back up MBRs, even on a system with only MS software (thanks to Knoppix). But in it normal mode, Ghost doesn't do a byte by byte copy (although you can force it to). It copies files, so it doesn't need to waste space when the drive or partition is partially full. It compresses that for even more space savings. And it can be used to restore the Ghost copy to a different size or geometry partition, or even to just extract a few needed files from the backup. Doesn't doing a byte by byte copy fail in all of those areas? And what benefit does G4U/G4L have over a simple dd copy?

[patelbhavesh]

I'm not quite understanding something here. dd will do a byte by byte copy. Heck, I use it to back up MBRs, even on a system with only MS software (thanks to Knoppix). But in it normal mode, Ghost doesn't do a byte by byte copy (although you can force it to). It copies files, so it doesn't need to waste space when the drive or partition is partially full. It compresses that for even more space savings. And it can be used to restore the Ghost copy to a different size or geometry partition, or even to just extract a few needed files from the backup. Doesn't doing a byte by byte copy fail in all of those areas? And what benefit does G4U/G4L have over a simple dd copy?

Yes G4L and G4U also are completey based on dd.It provides a better front end to dd, and it zips it .That is the main selling point that it has a UI and it allows you bot backup/restore to an FTP site.