Drive Imaging

**asjones** · 09-06-2003, 09:14 PM

I have been following Knoppix for a while and was wondering if anyone knew of a way to do Windows disk imaging with it?

I have also looked at other tools that could be included. So far the only tool that looks close is http://www.partimage.org/

However at this time true NTFS write support is lacking in Linux even in 2.5 (http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/). I then wondered to do imaging you don't have to understand all the data just to copy and rewrite it if you are doing disk imaging.

Anyone know of any other disk imaging programs?

thanks

Alan

**staff333** · 09-07-2003, 12:01 AM

dd is just a tool for copying data, but you can use it to read a single partition or an entire drive without needing to know anything about the file system. You would lose some space compared to programs that know about the file system, since it's going to read all the data on the drive whether it is being used by the file system or not, but you can compress it and gain some of the space back. You would use it like:

Code:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/bigdrive/drive1.img

Hope this helps.

**asjones** · 09-07-2003, 12:51 AM

I had looked at DD, but in my reading on other sites some had commented that DD on a Windows system had troubles due to the byte for byte copy. The problem was if the HD imageswere not the same size things get messed up.

I understand that you may run into an issues trying to image to a smaller drive, but one should be able to image to a larger drive.