Linux NTFS and Win 2000 Networks

[mike engles]

Hello

I know this topic has been covered earlier and I have tried the suggestions, but with no luck.

I use a small Win 2000 network with 30 machines and 4 servers. When a machine goes down it takes ages to get it running again.

What I want to do is to make a disk image of eack working machine onto a external USB drive.
I want to boot with Linux, delete the install on the machine and copy back the stored image.
Is this possble? I can make the disk image. This does take a long time, with many 'stalled' messages.
Perhaps it is because Linux only uses USB1? The hard drive and DVD rom are using DMA.
3 GB takes over 4 hours!


I am using Knoppix Boot CD version 3.6. I can boot fine into a Win 2000 machine and browse the hard drive as well as see a external USB drive.
I can make the USB writable, but not the HDA1 NTFS one.

I can mount the drive by right click-mount, but making the disk writable using action and read write fails, with this message

" The remount command failed. Maybe there is another process accessing the file system"

I have tried the NTFS mount command to no avail.
I have tried searching for the NTFS drivers on the hard disk. I know they are there. File search finds 4 of them. I placed copies on the desktop, but Linux cannot find them or use them



My next question is about the Network and using Linux to access it.
I can see the network using Samba. I can get into two of the servers using our normal Admin and password.
I cannot get into the other two servers. What would the reason be for this?

I can see 'Knoppix' from the main server and browse, having setup the knoppix account. I can copy from Knoppix,
but cannot write to it, because I cannot make HDA1 writable.
This would be another way of storing the machine images.

The problem is NTFS;is there a effective and efficient way to achieve what I am trying?


Mike Engles

[greenfly]

You can write to NTFS using the captive-ntfs utility (K->KNOPPIX->Utilities->). Of course, I wouldn't recommend writing a complete hard drive image to NTFS, as the captive-ntfs solution, while it works, is SLOW and you will find it takes forever to copy an image.

Of course, you don't need NTFS read or write support to image a full partition, dd or partimage doesn't care what filesystem a partition has, it just copies the ones and zeroes. If the removable drive you are storing the image on is USB1 only, you will find it will take a very long time to copy. Knoppix does support USB2 provided your hardware is USB2. In your case it might make more sense to store the images somewhere over the network and access them, for instance, with dd over ssh. Or, you could even set up a partimaged server using Knoppix, and access the images with partimage clients over the network.

[mike engles]

Hello

Thaks for your reply.

The gist of my argument was that I cannot mount the drive as writable.
Also I cannot with Samba get into the raid server that would store any image.

The usual password does not work.

Mike Engles

[Jameson]

If your having problems getting the drive to be writeable then after getting Captive NTSF setup then right click on the partition (hda1, hda2, etc) and click on "change read/write mode" which should then allow you to write to the partition.

[mike engles]

Hello

That is the problem. This just gives the message about some other process using the file, in my original messsage.

" The remount command failed. Maybe there is another process accessing the file system"

Actually I have now found what I want using Bart PE. It is still clunky, but will do the job.
In the end we will try one of the new batch of recovery utilities.

Thanks

Mike Engles