Imaging Hard Drives

[Brown, David (Test Dept)]

I would just dd all partition(s) to a file.
  dd if=/dev/sdx of=mydisk.img
To restore to a disk that is the same size or bigger:
  dd if=mydisk.img of=/dev/sdx

David (Doc) Brown
Rolls-Royce Electronics Engineer
P.O. Box 420 / Mail Stop S15
Indianapolis, IN 46206-0420
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doc.brown at rolls-royce.com / Email

-----Original Message-----
From: cinlug [mailto:cinlug-bounces at lists.cinlug.org] On Behalf Of Bernie Hoefer
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2016 9:26 PM
To: cinlug at lists.cinlug.org
Subject: Imaging Hard Drives

     I came across something today that I wanted to share with the group.
     I wanted to make a `perfect` copy of one of my computer's hard drives.  Basically, I wanted to image it so that if I needed, I could restore the hard drive to the *exact* condition it is in, today.
     I normally use SystemRescueCD's partimage for this task.  But while looking online for some other information, I stumbled across the fact that partimage hasn't been actively developed for about 6 years![1]
     It seems there is another program that is actively developed[2] that has improved features over partimage.[3]  I especially like the ability to restore the file system to a partition which is smaller than the original.
     Unfortunately, NTFS support is "experimental".  Since fsarchiver is not a block-level imaging program like partimage is, some of the NTFS file system peculiarities cause more trouble for fsarchiver.[4]  I could not archive a Windows 7 NTFS; I kept getting errors like this:

  [errno=31, Too many links]:
  oper_save.c#349,createar_item_winattr(): winattr:
  lgetxattr(/dell/Image/Factory3.wim,system.ntfs_dos_name):
  returned negative attribute size

     Despite its failure with Windows 7 NTFS,[5] I still thought this tool was commendable and wanted to share!


[1]<http://www.partimage.org/Changelog>
[2]<http://www.fsarchiver.org/Changelog>
[3]<http://www.fsarchiver.org/Fsarchiver_vs_partimage>
[4]<http://www.fsarchiver.org/Cloning-ntfs#Limitations>
[5]Apparently this is just a Windows 7/8/10 problem?

<http://tuxera.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=38517&sid=63af09bb08aa70b5f671c693b8c99531#p38517>

--
Bernie Hoefer
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"The more I know, the more I realize how much I do not understand."

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