Knoppix Free Space using Partimage

[hroush]

I am trying to image 4.2Gb of used space on a 80Gb drive, I boot up Knoppix open a root shell and launch partimage from the root prompt....

The problem seems to be that knoppix only has about 795Mb of free space under /ramdisk which I presume is where the tmp dir that I am trying to write my image file to which is not enough for the 4.2Gb, I've tried to make the hard drive write enabled w/ knoppix and put it on there but I have had no luck with it... Bran New Dell w/ XP... Would like to create an image file and then burn it to a DVD using K3b under Knoppix then use the DVD to Image 38 other bran new Dells which are all identical w/ a DVD burner and a DVD Rom which can run Knoppix w/ Part Image in one and copy the image from the other DVD drive???

What am I doing wrong or not doing? Can the free space under /ramdisk be easily increased or should I just create another partion and try to save it there? Help Me! I'm under the gun here and we don't have $3000.00 to buy Ghost for all these PCs.

[Dave_Bechtel]

--You shouldn't be writing backups to ramdisk. If you have a spare HD, throw that in as a slave and make a Linux filesystem on it for your backups. (ext3 / reiserfs, etc.) Trust me, that's an easier solution than trying to resize partitions.

--Writing to NTFS is more trouble than it's worth, and still buggy under Linux. And unless you have XP Corporate or something, you'll likely run into trouble with activation.

--However, here's a way to do it over the network using netcat... I'm assuming you'll have the 2 PC's next to each other, otherwise you'll have to dink around with SSH.

o Boot Knoppix both the "master" computer and on the PC that you want to overwrite
o Connect them to a network and give the master an IP (static or dynamic, doesn't matter as long as the 2 PC's can talk to each other)

o If you don't have a router or other method of obtaining an IP address using DHCP, this is how to give it a static IP address:

' ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0 up ' == As root, on the master. If you also do static IP on the slave, make the IP for the slave "10.0.0.2" or something. You want to give both of these computers an address that isn't already in use on your network, if possible.

Slave PC (FIRST) :
' nc -l -p 32100 |gzip -cd >/dev/hda ' == Netcat, listen on port 32100, uncompress the data stream and throw it directly to the HD. This will listen indefinitely until you start throwing data at it, and will then quit when the "master" PC quits sending.

( Now go over to the Master PC, running Knoppix -- as root! )

' cat /dev/hda | gzip -1 | nc -w 3 10.0.0.2 32100 ' == Grab data off the raw HD, compress, throw it at 10.0.0.2 port 32100, and auto-quit after 3 seconds of no data left to send.

--Note: NO PARTITIONS should be in use or mounted on either PC; if you have a swap partition on the Master PC, turn it off with ' swapoff -a ' before doing this.

--Note: The hard drives on all PC's should be *IDENTICAL* in size; in fact, all hardware across the PCs should be identical. FYI.

[hroush]

I'll give it a try...

Thanks again...