partimage for backing up Windoze partitions

[Asheville Joe]

A while back, Bob Meyer refered me to the partimage utility for backing 
up Windoze partitions.  http://www.partimage.org/  (I would have just 
used dump, but my dump man page says fat types of partitions are not 
supported.)

Anyway, as far as backup goes, partimage works like a champ.  (I'm still 
trying to figure out how to do a non-destructive test of the restore 
without taking my machine apart.  But that's another issue. :) ) 

The problem I'm having is that even though I specified -b (batch mode) 
on the partimage command line, it still displays a progress window which 
is very nice, but not what I want, and when it finishes, it displays 
statistics and hangs until I press enter.  This is a problem because I 
call partimage twice from the script because I have two Windoze 
partitions to backup and it doesn't ever get back to the script until I 
press enter.

Perhaps, I could pipe  a CR into  it to start with.  Haven't tried it yet.

Or, I could run separate backups as cron jobs, but cron doesn't work 
very well for me because  the machine is in my bedrooom and it's turned 
off when I'm not using it , so a lot of times, scheduled jobs don't 
happen because the machine is off (or in Windoze - shudder!) when it's 
time for them to run.

I also thought of running the backups in parallel in background, but I'm 
not very optimistic about what that would do to performance and maybe 
even wear and tear on the drives.

The command line I'm using is:
/usr/sbin/partimage -z1 -o -d -m -b save /dev/hda1 /mnt/portable/cdrive

The user manual really doesn't seem to address running it in batch mode.

I posted a question on their forum, but the most recent message there 
was from July, so I'm not expecting a quick answer.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Joe

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"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance." --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) English dramatist, critic