[olug] Ghost and Linux servers
Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us
Sun Nov 9 23:21:46 UTC 2003
K.J. Kirwan wrote:
> Would g4u (ghost 4 unix) help you?
g4u copies the raw disk or partitions. It'll work fine as long as the
destination hard drive is the *same* size (and my same size I mean the
same sector count) or larger as the source - not all drives of the same
advertized capacity have the same sector count. One 60GB drive can
actually end up being a couple GB smaller than another 60GB drive from
another manufacturer.
With Symantec's Ghost, a 40GB NTFS volume can be imaged onto a 2-3GB
file if that's all the data that's on the partition. That limits what
file systems Ghost can image; it's generally limited to FAT, FAT32,
NTFS, and *maybe* (that's a really strong maybe) HPFS. PowerQuest
DriveImage (aka PQDI, a similar program recently aquired by Symantec)
can handle ext2/3 file systems as well.
The big problem with Ghost is that it's a Win32/DOS program. You've not
developed true dislike for MS-DOS until you've tried to make a bootable
Ghost CD capable of pulling images off a Samba server (the network
drivers and related utilities wouldn't fit in 640KB RAM with the CD-ROM
drivers and utilities and still leave enough room for Ghost or PQDI to
work).
If someone could teach g4u to understand at least the file systems with
open-source implementations, many of us would be in hog eaven, so to speak.
And no, I'm not volunteering.
:)
--
Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us
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