[nflug] Live CD help

[Sam Stern]

Hi Joe,

>-----Original Message-----
>From: nflug-bounces at nflug.org [mailto:nflug-bounces at nflug.org]
>On Behalf Of Joe
>Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 12:05 PM
>To: NFLUG
>Subject: [nflug] Live CD help
>
>I (still) need to backup my Windoze 98se notebook computer
>hard disk to
>a usb hard disk.  The usb disk shows up fine in windoze.I tried to use
>Ghost, but couldn't get it to work.
>
<snip>
>I have a Knoppix 3.3 Live CD.  It works about the same as DSL,
>but gives
>me root in a the virtual terminal so I can do things.
>Issues:
>1)  Same as 1 for DSL
>

Hit F2 and F3 at knoppix boot (btw Knoppix is at version 4.0 right now and
it has much better support for usb than 3.3 had).


>2) I am currently backing up my C: drive as follows:
>tar -cvzf /mnt/sda1/cdrive.tgz /mnt/hda1
>Will this preserve everything I need to do a full restore if necessary?
>

No. To preserve the MBR, boot sector, partition table, both drives, etc, you
need to use dd. Here is the best process I have found to date:




Important Note: Linux support of usb hard drives is very incomplete and
often slow. Before you start this project using Linux and a usb hard drive
please be certain via dmesg and lsmod that your usb drive is using the
"ehci" driver. If it's using the "ohci" driver it's max speed is 12 mega
bits per second. This is a common problem with Linux and usb storage
devices.  The core reason this problem exists is that not all makers of usb
chipsets give Linux project leads the information they need to switch from
usb 2.0 12mps mode to usb 2.0 480mps high speed mode. To date, none of my 5
computers mother board chip sets are supported in high speed mode. My work
recently scrapped a usb drive based Linux solution as we could not find any
production hp or dell systems that support hi-speed usb under Linux. YMMV.

If you try the below procedure with a drive running at 12mbs rather than the
480mps you are used in windows the below procedure could take several DAYS
to a week or more to complete for a 40gb drive. I recently had to prepare a
deployment of a 4gb thumb drive at 12mps speed. The image process took
almost 16 hours!!!.

How to Compress the Image:

1) Empty the trash, clear your caches, "compact" all mail folders (including
outlook), Clear out c:\temp (or whatever your temp folder is called), and
generally clean up all the cruft.
2) now defrag the drive. I strongly recommend that you use either diskeeper
or perfect disk. However, Norton's defrag will get the job done well enough.
Both of the tools have free trials that are fully functional. It usually
takes AT LEAST two runs of a defrag program to get the drive as defragged as
possible. This step will really help you when it's time to mount the image
or restore the image.
3) Now shut down the Windows system.
4) Boot into Linux.
5) dd if=/dev/hda | gzip -9 > windows_boot_disk.gz  # NB please be prepared
to wait for several hours for this step to complete.
6) You may now mount the image if you like as a fat32 loop back image!

How to restore the image:

1) Start Linux
2) badblocks -wv # this certifies the drive is error free
3) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/had # this zeros the drive out and makes for
easier file recover and undelete later.
4) gunzip -c windows_boot_disk.gz | dd of=/dev/hda


Other Options:

1) Acronis true image is a ghost like program that uses a Linux livecd and
has MUCH better support for hardware than ghost. It's two weakness are: need
to install to a windows partition to get it's iso to burn a cd and Cannot
write image files to a Linux partition (but it does save, compress  and
restore bsd, windows, Solaris and Linux partitions.). Free Trial available
as is 30 day refund. Also note that you can burn an image of the live system
while it's running to a usb drive if it's supported by Acronis.
2) Partimage -- a Linux ghost like program with network support. Rather
fussy to setup but seems to work well. USB storage support will be the same
as your running kernel.




Yours,

Sam Stern
Grand Island, New York, USA


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