[olug] Ghost and Linux servers

Phil Brutsche phil at brutsche.us
Sun Nov 9 23:21:46 UTC 2003


K.J. Kirwan wrote:
> Would g4u (ghost 4 unix) help you? 

g4u copies the raw disk or partitions.  It'll work fine as long as the 
destination hard drive is the *same* size (and my same size I mean the 
same sector count) or larger as the source - not all drives of the same 
advertized capacity have the same sector count.  One 60GB drive can 
actually end up being a couple GB smaller than another 60GB drive from 
another manufacturer.

With Symantec's Ghost, a 40GB NTFS volume can be imaged onto a 2-3GB 
file if that's all the data that's on the partition.  That limits what 
file systems Ghost can image; it's generally limited to FAT, FAT32, 
NTFS, and *maybe* (that's a really strong maybe) HPFS.  PowerQuest 
DriveImage (aka PQDI, a similar program recently aquired by Symantec) 
can handle ext2/3 file systems as well.

The big problem with Ghost is that it's a Win32/DOS program.  You've not 
developed true dislike for MS-DOS until you've tried to make a bootable 
Ghost CD capable of pulling images off a Samba server (the network 
drivers and related utilities wouldn't fit in 640KB RAM with the CD-ROM 
drivers and utilities and still leave enough room for Ghost or PQDI to 
work).

If someone could teach g4u to understand at least the file systems with 
open-source implementations, many of us would be in hog eaven, so to speak.

And no, I'm not volunteering.

:)

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us




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