Transfering disk images via external USB hard drive

[Clive Long]

Hi,

My laptop hard drive is chucking out errors.

I would like to backup to a USB hard drive using a utility / program that runs under both Windows XP and Linux.

I then want to run some kind of disk checking routine to determine whether I need to buy a new hard drive for the laptop.

I then want to be able to restore the disk image to the old laptop / disk or to a new device AND for the restored image to boot (either Linux or winXP)

Any suggestions please?


Thanks

Clive

[Mr Darcy]

I then want to be able to restore the disk image to the old laptop / disk or to a new device AND for the restored image to boot (either Linux or winXP)

Any suggestions please?

Acronis True Image could be just what you want, and with a 14 day free trial might definitely be what you want! It can also restore the volumes to the larger size disk you'd obviously get if you need a new one, resizing and rearranging as you choose. FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP filesystems supported and just blind sector copies for anything else.

[ducasi]

I presume you want the backup to be able to copy both Windows and Linux, but wouldn't actually need to run under both?

How I'd do it would be to boot the laptop using Knoppix, take a copy of the hard disk using a simple "dd" copy.

You can then mess with the hard disk, and hopefully copy the disk image back...

Having multiple partitions and restoring to a different device would complicate matters – especially as you want to multi-boot...

In fact, it's all definitely easier said than done...

Given that you have errors on the disk, it's likely that either the disk is failing or there is file-system corruption.

In the first case, backup it up will be difficult, and restoring to a different disk will be complicated.

In the second case, you'll have preserved the file-system errors in your image, and so not solved anything...

So maybe I'd try a combination of tar to backup Linux and your personal files (Linux/Knoppix can mount NTFS file-systems), and re-installing Windows XP and applications...

Booting Linux once you've copied everything back depends on what boot loader you use. If you're using lilo, you'd need to at least re-run it, grub would also need re-installed as the boot loader if Windows has replaced it. Both can be done from the Knoppix CD I think, given the right parameters...

There's probably (maybe better or easier?) ways of doing this from within Windows, but the Linux stuff would probably be missed.

Good luck!

(EDIT: Looks like Mr Darcy has a better solution... )

[frodo]

Acronis True Image could be just what you want, and with a 14 day free trial might definitely be what you want! It can also restore the volumes to the larger size disk you'd obviously get if you need a new one, resizing and rearranging as you choose. FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP filesystems supported and just blind sector copies for anything else.

Assuming your laptop has a bootable CD drive.

I'm not sure the trial will allow you to do all you want especially in terms are a bare metal restore.

However I've used Acronis (TrueImage) versions for years and found it reliable and well worth paying for - after getting over this issue you may find its other backup features quite useful also.

If you don't want to pay anything they quite frequently have a version on the front of computer magazines, which may do what you want - even if it doesn't you can use it to get an upgrade price.

Paragon (an Acronis) competitor sometimes also have similar software which is likely to do the job on the front of magazines - may be called Drive Backup / Exact Image / Rescue Kit - I've never found these worth paying for but what you get for free can be quite decent.

[Clive Long]

Acronis True Image could be just what you want, and with a 14 day free trial might definitely be what you want!

Found it online.

Looks the job.

When my USB disk arrives I will download True Image and give it a whirl.

I will probably licence it as it looks the job for doing regular / incremental backups as well as saving the data on this disk.

Clive

[bigdjiver]

Not relevant to the question being discussed, but Maxtor have a very nice free disk copy utility called Maxblast that works if you have one of their disk drives.

http://tinyurl.com/njwwu

[Clive Long]

Update:

USB disk arrived. Already formatted as FAT32.

Plugged disk into Linux laptop. Disk recognised as /dev/sdc1. After a bit of Googling I cobbled together

Created new mount directory /wdsdc
Mounted /dev/sdc1 to /wdsdc
Ran both "cp -r" and "tar" from source directory to /wdsdc on the USB drive

The copies worked except FAT32 has a 4GB individual file size limit.

I tried to convert USB drive from FAT32 to NTFS. Failed but I'm sure if I delete all files on the drive the convert will work. Then I can create a tar backup on the USB of whatever size is necessary.

Clive

[ducasi]

Hi Clive,

Can your Linux write to NTFS?

I ran into this problem yesterday when I was trying to make a copy of a 160GB disk in a file on a 250GB disk, formatted as FAT32.

If you are writing your backup as a tar file, you can pipe the output of tar into "split" to create multiple files to get around the 4G limit.

Recombining them to restore is as simple as using "cat".

[Clive Long]

If you are writing your backup as a tar file, you can pipe the output of tar into "split" to create multiple files to get around the 4G limit.

Recombining them to restore is as simple as using "cat".

Hi Ducasi

Subtle.

I used the following

tar -cvvf winsamba.tar /Winsamba-v2/ | split -b 4000m

and ended up with one file, winsamba.tar, that is 4Gb. The source data is over 9GB so I don't feel the split has actually done its job.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Clive

[ducasi]

Try this...

tar cf - /Winsamba-v2/ | split -b 4000m - winsamba.tar.