I have been using GHOST for quite a few years to back up
my Windoze partitions from NTFS to a series of images
on a fat32 partition. I usually boot off a DOS7 bootable CD
and simply ghost over to the fat32 partition.
I am rebuilding my laptops and desktops to dual boot
Windows7 and Suse 11.2
My goal is to create restore images from my NTFS and ext3
partitions into directories on the fat32 partition
for a restoration to my “gold baseline” build
after any corruption.
Any suggestions?
My partition layout is below. This is
output from gdisk.exe in DOS7. It’s
an 80gig drive.
1 = Windows-7
2 = /boot
3 = swap
5 = /
6 = /fat32
Partition Mbytes System Usage
1 PRIMARY 30001.0 NTFS/HPFS 39%
2 PRIMARY 3000.0 LINUX 4%
3 PRIMARY 8000.0 LINUX SWAP 10%
4 EXTENDED 35306.9 46%
5 LOGICAL 18002.5 LINUX 24%
6 LOGICAL 17304.4 FAT32 23%
Hello qawtbh, I have been using Acronis True Image for a few years and back up each XP partition & each Suse partition sector by sector (except the swap) and have never had an issue. I am not sure about Ghost but would think if you could back up in the same manner it would work.
Your setup is similar to mine except my drive is 160G. I was able to make my Windows 7 partition 102G. Originally I had a 20G Linux partition but found myself squeezed for space all the time so I resized my partitions so I could have a 30G Linux partition. I run everything with the Windows 7 boot manager. I use a Windows program called EasyBCD to configure the 7 boot manager. If you do use the 7 boot manager you will want save the MBR to a file. I found that Linux will write over your MBR if you’re not careful. I boot DOS off of a USB drive and run a DOS program called AEFDISK, it allows you to save and restore the MBR. Grub is OK to use too, I use the Windows boot manager now because years ago I had bad experiences with LILO. I hope that is the suggestions you were looking for.
This is a fdisk -l of my drive:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 225 1806178+ 7 HPFS/NTFS - Boot
/dev/sda2 225 13008 102680077+ 7 HPFS/NTFS - Win 7
/dev/sda3 13008 15430 19453770 7 HPFS/NTFS - Win XP
/dev/sda4 15431 19457 32346877+ f W95 Ext’d
/dev/sda5 15431 15692 2100861 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda6 15692 19349 29373088+ 83 Linux ext3 - openSuSE
/dev/sda7 19349 19457 871424 b FAT32
> My goal is to create restore images from my NTFS and ext3 partitions
> into directories on the fat32 partition for a restoration to my “gold
> baseline” build after any corruption.
>
> Any suggestions?
Current version of Ghost should handle EXT3 just fine, from what I
recall. Earlier versions (7 or earlier IIRC) had problems with the EXT3
journal, so to do a file-by-file system you had to convert back to EXT2
using tune2fs.
There is a 3 pages article in CT 02/2010 (german magazine) about Clonezilla. It is free, easy to use and supports ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT, NTFS and Mac OSX file system.
I also meant to mention in my earlier reply that I have used DOS Ghost (v2003 I think) to save my Linux and XP partitions to the Windows 7 partition. And I was able to restore both with no problem.
On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:56:02 +0000, joostvanrooij wrote:
> Both Ghost and Acronis are nice tools.
>
> For an open source alternative use dd or ddrescue
>
> Note1: pipe it into gzip otherwise the filesize will be too big Note2:
> use a proper blocksize to speed things up
ddrescue is good; I’ve also used Ghost for Linux (g4l) which is not a
Symmantec product, but does seem a pretty good imaging solution.
On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:46:02 +0000, please try again wrote:
> There is a 3 pages article in CT 02/2010 (german magazine) about
> ‘Clonezilla’ (http://www.clonezilla.org). It is free, easy to use and
> supports ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT, NTFS and Mac OSX file system.