Knoppix - The ghosting/backup solution?

[Xackery]

Hello all, I have been considering starting my own tech repair shop and customer support business for helping people with their computer needs.
Now a situation I have been considering is let's imagine somebody just got their entire system overloaded (WinXP) with viruses, unrepairable and your best solution is simply to format and clean the baby up. They tell you they have a few important documents on there they want to save before the format occurs.

Here's my solution: Whip out your trusty Knoppix CD, along with a USB flash stick to load data on to. Start the baby up, and have the user then and there point out any important documents they may need to be able to get the show back on the road. (This includes situations where the OS won't boot due to system failures, etc..) Now that all their important data is copied, you can take their computer and return to your tech shop. You begin the fixing process and everything is spic and span. You restore the important data they wanted, and ask them if they would like a backup of their system for restoration later.

Now here's the question here. Norton Ghost seems to be the most popular solution to create backups of your hard drive. At this time, Norton Ghost costs around 70 bucks for a copy. I'm unsure if you'd have to have your customer buy a copy of Norton to do a system restore (probably not), but regardless I would love to do this for no money in anyone's case.

So reading around I see PartImage. This looks like a linux example (with a few bonus features) of Ghost. I was wondering, do you think it would be possible to create a copy of Knoppix that would actually be a "freeware" system restore disk for a customer's hard drive? Make it easy enough they simply insert the disk and away it goes, restoring their hard disk to the previous state with minimum user intervention? I think that would be an awesome way to create a new clean copy for the user and not have to call you up (and cost them money) to do a system restore.

I understand PartImage has an "experimental" marking with NTFS, and NTFS is a very tricky partition to work with under the linux environment under most circumstances.. But what are the alternatives then?

Thank you for your time!

[osde.info]

try G4L or G4U

[MiroDietiker]

I reply to this thread since i get nearly identical error:

When i start on a debian sarge linux a partimaged (-v shows 0.6.4) which is correctly working for debian2debian images and use it with partimage client from Knoppix 5.0.1EN there's always the user credential error showing up.

I didn't get a solution on 5.0.1 but was able to use 3.9.1 successfully.

Seems to be a heavy bug in knoppix 5.0.1, even it shows the same version 0.6.4 as on the working debian and knoppix...
This is really a poor situation since knoppix 5.0.1 woulb be best prerequisite (improved hw-support to 3.9.1) for backup/restores on any computer here ;-(

Any workaround welcome!

[kaspare]

Another "ghost like" system could be ntfsclone:
http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html

If you have space and time a plain dd image would be safer. You can always mount it compare the files against the filesystem, do anything while restoring:
files related system mounting the image find and pipe to grep for any filter you want to add
bitstream restore just dd to the new disk.
You can have a look of ddrescue if you have a damaged hd and/or dcfldd (http://dcfldd.sourceforge.net/) a forensic version of dd that have nice features like progress bar, hashing on the fly etc. etc.

If you don't use his "special image format" ntfsclone can make mountable images.

Cheers

Max

[ckamin]

Why not create a dos or pcdos boot disk for Ghost and then use it to produce a bootable archive disk set when doing the back up. The customer will then have a bootable recovery archive for him/her to restore the system.

Acronis works good too.

[sakiZ]

from Konsole:

Copy source partition on old drive to destination partition on new drive:

cp /dev/hdx /dev/hdxx

Substitute the correct number for x.

sakiZ