trying to install.... busy hard drives

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, so you're talking about scandisk, the windows/dos utility, right? The problem with that is that I don't have admin rights when logged-into windows. I never needed such rights before.

So, the deal I made with the techies at my school was that I'd leave their XP installs alone as long as they left my linux installs allone. The one exception being, of course, my resizing the XP partitions to make space for linux in the first place!

Actually, here's another exception - when the techies ghost my hdds! This problem first came about when all my Dells, one by one over the period of the last few months, had to have their mobos replaced due to having a thermal event (leaking capacitors) which prevented booting. So, when Dell sends a replacement mobo, the techies replace the old one and ghost the hdd from some windows PC down the hall (not in my dual-boot lab for some reason).

Why they have to ghost the hdd after replacing the mobo is beyond me. They tell me it has something to do with getting the correct DHCP settings from a working PC that otherwise is a pain...? So, I told them to fix their XP partitions as something was obviously wrong with the XP partitions after ghosting. So, I guess I already suggested they run scandisk, but they never did....

BTW, several of the PCs I'm having trouble with were originally installed as dual-boots by yours truly without a problem! I also suggested they make a ghost image from one of MY working PCs (a dual-boot) to use when ghosting instead. In fact, maybe they could use this image to fix the bad ghostings....

Is there a way I could "ghost" a working dual-boot PC, ie: using linux as I don't have windows admin rights, so I can fix their handiwork myself?

Thanx,
AJG

[OErjan]

to ghost a disk i would use dd, should be possible to do with NFS mounted source.

dd if=/dev/myHDD of=/mnt/image/image.img

to replace

dd if=/mnt/image/image.img of=/dev/myHDD

here you have some more.
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...5&highlight=dd

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I'd like to use your dd procedure to make an image of a working PC with all the partitions intact, however, this is going to be a huge file, right? If I don't compress the file, as described above, how big will the image file be for a 40GB hdd? Will it image all 40GB even if many GBs are not as yet used? If I compress, what compression rate would I get, about 50%? I just don't know where I'd store such a huge image file! If the image file only copies stored files and not physical space, and I compress at 50%, then the image could be as small as 4GB, but I still don't know where I'd store it....

Is there some way to install the image directly as its being made - a straight transfer of data without having to save an intermediary image file at all?

BTW, here's some stats if it helps:
These are Dell GX270s with 40GB hdd, 750MB RAM and Pentium IVs running at 2.8GHz.
Also, the partitions on the working machines are set-up roughly as follows.
hda1: Windows 95 rescue (<1GB)
hda2: Windows XP primary boot partition (19GB)
hda3: KNOPPIX-installered Linnux ext3 partition (19GB)
hda4: linux-swap (whatever's left < 1GB)

TIA,
AJG