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On 1 Nov 2005 at 8:25, Paul Creelman wrote:

I would like to use an external, partitioned 250 GB HD to image 3 separate XP computers each 30 GB in size. How do I do this so that if any one of the 3 computers´ HD died, I could immediately copy the image for that computer back to a new HD from the corresponding partition of the external HD so I wouldn´t have to go through the laborious setup process of installing several of programs.

As I understand it Acronis and Norton Ghost will not allow copying an image to a partitioned external drive - they demand using only one partition on the external drive - thus 1 backup max per external HD.

You might want to check out g4l or g4u. Both can do local hard drive images, but are mainly designed to create images to an ftp server. The both use dd to copy the drive or partition, and then can use compression to reduce the size of the info, and upload it to an ftp server. In a local configuration, you could copy a drive or partition to another drive. If the external drive is recognized by the boot cd, it would need to be setup as a partition that could be written to by the cd image. G4L uses linux, G4U uses netbsd.

I make images of my computer labs to an ftp server running Fedora Core 3 with a 250GB drive. An 80GB drive with 98, XP and Fedora Core 3 makes a single 14GB image file in about 50 minutes, and takes about the same time to restore using lzop compression. Takes more time, doing multiple machines, but generally do one machine, and then use udpcast to image all the others from that system. Udpcast can be used to directly transfer the image to the other machines from the server, but presents a problem for me, since our MIS department has 4 class C networks running on single physical network, so only the machines on the same class C as the server connect. I use udpcast diskette to boot the machines, and assign 10.0.0.x numbers to get it to work.

I haven't done what you looking at, but this is what I think would work. With G4L, you could create a linux partition, and format it on the external drive. Boot from the cd, and then use the local copy options to create images to that drive with different names.

I'd probable just setup a linux machine, and use the ftp options, since that is simpler, and with the front end option of g4l, you could even setup a system to allow the users to be able to update and restore on there own, but it would take diskspace and bandwidth.

At least something that might work. (This would also work with a Windows FTP server, but you need to make sure the server supports files larger than 2GB or 4GB, some do not.

Thanks Paul Creelman

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