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