partimage...

[Robert Nichols]

bruce wrote:
> hi.
> 
> i'm looking at doing a complete copy/restore of a drive. i want to copy the
> contents of a drive (or as much as possible) to a drive on another machine
> in the network.
> 
> the 2nd machine on the 2nd network will be larger than the 1st drive. i want
> to then reformat/clean the 1st drive, and then copy the information from the
> 2nd drive back to the 1st machine.
> 
> i'm looking at using partimage and wanted to know if anyone has any real
> experience using partimage.
> 
> any thoughts/pointers would be helpful. i can't screw this up!!!

I've been using partimage to save and restore NTFS partitions.  I've
never tried it with stuff like ext3 extended attributes and the like.
The interface is clunky, but it works.

The only problem I ran into was that partimage didn't want to restore
from a gzip-ed image file larger than 2GB. (I could manually gunzip
the file and restore from that just fine.)  As long as I let it use
its default of breaking up the saved image into 2GB chunks it worked
just fine.  That was with version 0.6.5_beta2.  Perhaps that's been
fixed in the latest version.

Since you mentioned reformatting and then restoring, I'm not sure
you understand just what partimage does.  When you restore a
partition, partimage will completely overwrite any filesystem
formatting, replacing it with what was saved.  Everything except
the contents of the free space gets saved and restored.

-- 
Bob Nichols         Yes, "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.