udpcast is reading the drive as raw data (similar to dd).
It doesn't care what file system is there or whatever.
You can select a partition, or the whole drive.
To get the best compression of the unused portion of your
drive, write zeros to it. If it is something like FAT32 or
ext2, then this is possible with the dd command. If you
are stuck with NTFS, then the perl script mentioned
on the g4u web page will zero the unused portion of a drive
partition.
In a recent laptop I'm working with having a 40 GB drive,
imaging takes about 30 minutes. When you are writing the
empty part of the drive, the only bottleneck is the drive's
write speed. Writing zeros is as fast as your drive
can go and this doesn't drag down the performance as much
as one might expect.
Any tool that can write just the files, needs to be able to
read and write the file system type. You didn't mention
what that was in your email. It also needs to be able
to set up the boot record information on the MBR, which
is fairly simple for something like LILO with Linux, but
not as straightforward with Windows.
I tried doing a image and restore of a Windows XP FAT32 system
using tar from KNOPPIX booted cdrom and using dd to grab 512 bytes from
the MBR of /dev/hda (and stick it into the tar). When the
data was restored, I had a file system, but the way Windows
uses the MBR must involve a hard pointer to the offset
where the boot loader resides. I don't know how to do
the equivalent of "rerunning LILO" for Windows except
that funky fixmbr command that exists only in the Windows XP
recovery console.
Linux (or the busybox boot environment) cannot write to
an NTFS system, so this is not a possibility either.
The methods to do this are known to the makers of Ghost
and all of the companies Symantec has been buying up that
make competitors to Ghost (except for the inreliable
Imagecast by Phoenix).
--Donald Teed
On Thu, 13 May 2004, Sugg, Michael wrote:
Is there a switch command that will enable udpcast to
only image the HD
that has information on it? For ex. If a HD only has 6 of the 40 Gig
taken on it, Ghost will only copy 6G. I love the udpcast software, but
it takes longer because it copies the whole 40G HD. Is there a switch
that will fix this? And where do I need to put the command? Thanks.
Michael Sugg
AV/Computer Tech
Randolph County Schools
2234D Enterprise St.
Asheboro NC 27205
(w)336-318-6170
(c)336-736-7538