I dual boot with windows XP pro and Linux. Usually mandrake 10 or fedora core2.

I have tried Powerquest drive image to backup my windows partition to a seccond hard drive, and it works good, but everytime I restore the image it kills my dual booting and sometimes it breaks windows as well and gives me a "BSOD" blue screen of death. heheheh

I have seen G4U Ghost for Unix, bootable Cd that does a COMPLETE backup of the hard drive Bit by Bit, but that takes about 4 days and a seccond computer with the same hard drive running ftp service.

I think it gives me the result I want, but It is tooo slow.

Is there some better options ?
is imaging the Right thing to be doing ?

What do you do and what works for you ?

obviously windows breaks more than Linux does and needs to be restored
more often.
Should I put windows on One physical disk and linux on another ?

what should I do ?

You could copy your windows partition to one big file:
dd if=/dev/hdXX of=/path/to/file
where XX is your windows partition.
Make sure the filesytem you put the file on supports files of over 2GB (if your windows partition is that large)!
Restoring goes by simply swapping if= and of=
!!! Be sure not to type the wrong partition number when restoring or you may lose data !!!

ok, Right now, its all on a 120 GB HDD
Regulary, my windows partition is around 80 Gb and my linux is the rest minux the 2 gb swap space.

Can you give me more detaills on the process you described ?
Step by step as if telling a new linux guy how to do it and so
I might have some understanding as to the process as well.

Keep in mind, that the above is the primary master physical disk.
I have others as well.
Getting more hard drives just for the purpose is not a problem.
I can design and do the absolute best solution anyone can think of
if they tell me what it is and how to do it.

Is there a partitioning software that is cross platform compatable ?

Whould it be better to have a different boot loader like XOSL?

what would be the best settup ?
having windows occupy ONE physical disk and having linux Occupy a Different Physical disk and have a bootloader on a disk of its own made just for loading OS's ?

Sounds like your setup is close to mine. I have a 120 GB drive. The first half is XP Pro, the second half (three partitions) is Mandrake 10 (Swap, / , and /home).

Having Windows on one drive and linux on a second is nice though. Lilo or Grub don't care where linux is. You can have Windows on the first, linux on the second, and as long as the bootloader is on the first disks MBR, everything should work fine.

I haven't really tried having XP or linux or bootloader in many other configurations. They might work, but I know this works for me.

As far as imaging software and such, I haven't found anything better than Symantec Ghost. Not sure if it destroys your MBR or not though (It shouldn't. It makes EXACT duplicates). Always good to have a boot disk or a rescue disk though. Just boot up your system, log in as root, and type 'lilo'. That should restore your MBR with your bootloader.


Hope it helps a bit,
Exo

Yea man. That is some good info. I wish that more people would share thier info.
I always try to do like you did and give out as many details as i can. sounds that
you, like I do, believe that what goes around comes around.

What version of ghost do you use ?
how does ghost work ?
it is a norton product correct ?
Right now I have drive image 2002

Ya, I'm not "elite". I remember how frustrating it was to try to learn something simple when I was starting with *nix and couldn't get answers besides "Look for the answer". I guess that's *nix recursive mentality "If you can't find the answer, look for it.". Hmmm....

Anyways,
I use the Ghost 2003 DOS client (you don't have to install it to a hard drive). I created a bootable CD with a few utilities and apps on it. I use Ghost very frequently. I actually had a post here a few days ago looking for open source imaging/cloning software that might compare.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hlight=cloning

I didn't look into Acronis though.

Also, I just read on this board more about "partimage".

http://www.partimage.org/

Maybe look into that. I'm thinking I didn't give it enough of a chance (I also use the Knoppix 3.3 bootable disc, which has partimage).

How does Ghost work? How do you mean? If you mean how it works overall for me, then it works great. I've never had a problem with it. Everything comes out as it should. If you mean technically, then all I know is that it does a bit by bit (Raw) copy of a partition or drive.
Only problem is that it doesn't support Reiser or the other new journaling file systems. I've never tried it on them though. I usually just image ext2, ext3, FAT32, or NTFS.

It is a Norton/Symantec product.

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/

I've never used Driveimage so I can't say much about that.

Hope it helps,
Exo