[Udpcast] Udpcast Digest, Vol 11, Issue 4

[Donald Teed]

You may want to think of the partition as just "data" but
if it has an OS you want to boot, then you need data
related to your boot record.  How many partitions are on
the Windows XP machines?  If it really is just data (not an OS),
then you could have a drive D: or whatever that is set up
by sending and receiving /dev/hda2 .

Again, this solution does not transmit only the files
from one machine to another.  It operates on partitions,
or the whole drive.

If you are booting Windows XP from /dev/hda1 (C: drive) 
and you only overwrite /dev/hda1, you will run into two
issues.  One is that possibly the boot record will not longer
point to the boot loader of the system.  If you need to
make a bootable OS transfer, you need to work with /dev/hda
(usually /dev/hda is the device, but the point is the full
disk needs to be imaged and restored).

The other issue is a more generic problem that you must
consider regardless of how you are imaging: the requirement that
sysprep from Microsoft must be used to make unique system IDs
for Windows XP machines.  Perhaps you are handling that already,
but when the language only refers to "data" it isn't clear if there
is an awareness of the needs for this.  This is mentioned
on the udpcast web site and also at Microsoft:

http://udpcast.linux.lu/windows.html

--Donald Teed


On Mon, 17 May 2004, Sugg, Michael wrote:

> 
> 
> This is a reply from a co-worker. Does this make a little bit more
> since? We are using WindowsXP Fat32. We always copy the whole partition.
> 
> 
> Michael Sugg
> AV/Computer Tech
> Randolph County Schools
> 2234D Enterprise St.
> Asheboro NC 27205
> (w)336-318-6170
> (c)336-736-7538
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Uhl, Mark 
> Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 9:39 AM
> To: Sugg, Michael
> Subject: RE: Udpcast Digest, Vol 11, Issue 4
> 
> We are mostly using udpcast in a machine to machine situation. We would
> like a way to add a command switch (/?)   to the udpcast floppy that
> would only copy from the sender to the receiver only the portion on the
> hard drive that actually has data not the entire hard drive.  
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sugg, Michael 
> Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 8:36 AM
> To: Moffitt, Jimmy; Uhl, Mark
> Subject: Udpcast Digest, Vol 11, Issue 4
> 
> 
> 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
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > 
> 
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> 
> End of Udpcast Digest, Vol 11, Issue 4
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