On 12 July 2010 16:45, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
On 12/07/10 15:57, Jim Rippon wrote:
My attempts at using partimage and g4u amongst others have been mixed, but in all cases I have found these were vastly more time consuming than the £30 cost of Ghost.
One of the problems with commercial offerings tends to be that the prices scale depending on usage, and for server O/S they seem to charge more. I looked at Ghost but it only says it supports XP/Vista (not even W7!).
I would assume that if I run it from a boot CD then a disk is a disk is a disk, but knowing my luck I'll start it up and it'll detect a Windows Server install and tell me I need a different version. This is one of my biggest gripes with commercial software! Also, I didn't say this originally but I have 15 different servers I need to do this with, and I wouldn't be surprised if I needed a new licence for each server?
It looks like dd will be the most reliable but slow, ntfsclone faster but won't handle the partitioning, so ideally a tool which combines the two will do what I need.
Mark,
With my latest laptop, I used the bootable GParted Live CD to backup and delete one of the recovery partitions, then resized the existing ones to make room for a linux partition, before restoring the original recovery partition.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
I haven't used it, but you could alse take a look at Parted Magic:
HTH,
Peter.