Imaging Techniques, was Re: [TriLUG] Which laptop to buy

[Brian Henning]

I thought I'd pipe up and mention g4u as a great way to create an image 
of a hard drive.

It comes in the form of a small bootable CD image.  It makes a simple 
task (one command) of creating and restoring from images of partitions 
or entire drives.

It's a little less secure than David's method, as it goes over 
in-the-clear FTP channels (and therefore requires an FTP server 
somewhere), but it has gzip built in and, if proper steps are taken to 
prepare a drive-to-be-imaged (defragment if applicable, write zeros to 
all blank space), can do dramatic things to the size of the image 
depending on how much unused space is on the source drive.  (Of course, 
in defense of David's method, gzip could absolutely be part of the 
command pipeline his method shows.)

I've seen images of clean installations on 80-GB HDs compress to under 4GB.

Check it out: http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Cheers,
~Brian

Corey wrote:
> Thanks David, I'll look into that.
> 
> On 12/20/05, David McDowell <turnpike420 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>I used this method of cloning taught to me by other TriLUG members:
>>http://www.turnpike420.net/linux/Knoppix_Uses.txt
>>
>>Worked fine for me!  So clone yourself before you wreckity wreck
>>yourself.  :p  If you don't like what the new stuff brings, re-image
>>your drive from the .img file.  Make sure you use the command in the
>>Clone section, not Blank section.
>>
>>David McD