[Udpcast] No success with imaging XP

[Michael D. Setzer II]

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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
> 
> 


+----------------------------------------------------------+
  Michael D. Setzer II -  Computer Science Instructor      
  Guam Community College  Computer Center                  
  mailto:mikes at kuentos.guam.net                            
  mailto:msetzerii at gmail.com
  http://www.guam.net/home/mikes
  Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
+----------------------------------------------------------+

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu
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