gzipping a partition

[VJ]

Hello,

I'm trying to gzip my Windows-partions using Knoppix 3.6 (means of an easy system restore ). This is the situation:
/dev/sdc1 : NTFS partition (10 GB) I want to gzip, not mounted (SCSI harddisk on a aic79xx)
/dev/sdb1 : ext2 partition (32 GB) where I'll place the gz file, mounted on /mnt/sdb1 (FW800 harddisk)

At a rootprompt, I enter:
-
gzip -1 </dev/sdc1 >/mnt/sdb1/seagate.gz
-

When the seagate.gz is somewhere around 6-8 GB, I get this errormessage:
-
gzip: stdin: Input/Output error
-

A friend suggested bad blocks on /dev/sdc1, but the Seagate (Cheetah 10K.6) should map bad blocks automatically, so they should be invisible for the system. I will scan for them tonight, but I don't think it will yield anything...
Any suggestions?

Thanks!


Jörg

edit: forum ate < and >...

[UtwigMU]

Get PQ driveimage 7.

It images system drive ( C: ) live under windows to another partition or network or optical drive.

For restore you boot of CD (Windows preboot enviroment - supports mouse, network, etc, just needs a floppy with SCSI/RAID driver like a Windows install does...) and it's up quickly.

[VJ]

Interesting... (PQ Drive Image 7 seems to have been replaced with Ghost 9)

But I had hoped to do it with Linux (my needs are fairly limited, Ghost will surely be overkill for me).


Jörg

[KeiFront]

Have you tried http://www.partimage.org/ yet.

[VJ]

Ok, I checked the drives for bad blocks, and none were found. I then recreated my ext2 filesystem, tried again, and it worked!
(haven't verified the archive, or tried to restore, but gzip stopped without errors)

Keifront:
Partition Image comes with Knoppix , but I wasn't sure on what it does. Having read the documentation on the site you linked, I'll probabely try it with Partition Image as well.
It would offer me the advantage of splitting the file image file in smaller portions, which would allow me to put the image on FAT32.
Of course, this would mean the "backup" is visible to Windows, with the major upside of being able to move it around (cd/dvd/other partitions). But I wonder if there are any downsides to this...

Thanks for the link!


Jörg

[KeiFront]

VJ, why don't you buy a cheap ide-disk for backup purposes?

[spadnos]

He has one already

- Steve

[UtwigMU]

Well Partimage page says NTFS support is experimental, which could explain bad blocks.

[VJ]

Keifront: It isn't really for data-backup, but to be able to easily restore a clean Windows (installation of this system takes a couple of days due to the amount of hardware and software ; as some some software install plugins in other tools, the order in which everything is installed is also important , and requires that reboots must be done when asked for )

spadnos: Nope, it is firewire.

UtwigMU: The bad blocks occured the first couple of times with the commandline commands as I mentioned in my first post, not with partimage. They were solved after recreating the ext2 file system though. According to the documentation of partimage, NTFS support is experimental, but the problems arise in creating the image files. IF you can create the files, it won't be a problem.


So yesterday, I gave partimage a go.
And I must say: it works perfectly. The files are much smaller than with my manual gzip (our sysadmin has written a program to zerofill the remainder of the drive, which should probabely yield a similar filesize with the gzip). Creating a gzip archive takes about 10 minutes (haven't tried bzip2), and yields a file just under 2 GB. Splitting the files in different blocks is also not a problem (the standard suggested size is 2037 MB, guess they had FAT32 in mind ).

In the restore, it should be possible to restore the MBR as well (as in the first screenshot on http://www.partimage.org/screenshots.en.html ), but I haven't tried this (it gave a warning the partitions don't match).
(but the Windows XP boot CD also can restore an MBR)

One thing remains: the partition on which you restore must be at least the size of the partition in the image. So one needs to partition information manually.

Either way, this tool is just what I needed!

Thanks!


Jörg