OS agnostic bootable backup?
 

If I boot knoppix on my dual boot windows/linux desktop, I assume I can use dd or cp to copy all my partitions to a spare USB drive. Should my boot disk get corrupted, I understand I could boot knoppix again and do the dd or cp in the reverse direction and expect to be able boot. Does this sound reasonable?

Is there a way I can take that (very large) image on the USB drive, compress it, and burn it to a DVD in such a way that I can boot knoppix and reverse the process to restore the windows and linux boot partitions on my boot disk?

Is there a better way to implement OS agnostic bootable backup? I tried mondo rescue about a year ago and could not get it to boot. Since there did not seem to be a lot of activity with this program (I solicited for help on the forum but did not receive any help), I have given up on it.

Siegfried

You may want to check out Mondo again. My coworker used it to build a DVD image of a RHEL 4 server he built a couple of months ago and was very glowing about his ability to do a BMR on it. In fact due to a mixup it turned out the system he had was not the one he was supposed to have had so it was swapped out for another one with more drives. On using the Mondo DVD he'd created for it the new server not only loaded cleanly but actually detected the difference in drives and was able to allocate the additional ones.

I recall during his early experimentation with it he said he'd posted in a forum or sent email and actually got an email back from one of the folks that created Mondo to help him through one of the bumps he ran into.

If it is just to back the system you don't need anything but a Linux Live CD. Use it to make a Grub floppy or Grub CD and it can boot every OS in a PC.

You can dd the partition or disk but have to use a different command for compression as dd just clone bit by bit.

This might be of interest.


Keith

Does Mondo Rescue require Linux Be Installed?
 

OK, thanks. I'll try mondo rescue again for my dual boot machine. As I recal, mondo works for even windows partitions. I assume I can find it by google search. Previously, however, google searching lead me to an old copy that appeared to be the only copy available on the mondo rescue web site. I hope this is fixed by now.

Now what about my windows only boot machine?

Will Mondo Rescue accommodate machines that don't have linux installed on the HD? Previously it did not. Perhaps I could use Mondo Rescue by booting linux from a flash stick?

If not, I am back to my original question: If I have a bootable windows partition on a disk, can I compress it and save it to a DVD? Oh, I suppose I could buy a bootable windows backup program. They come with some USB disks but I have not tried them.

Has anyone tried this?

Thanks,
Siegfried

I back up the whole hard disk, put away the original and use the cloned copy -----> the scheme

How to compress windows partition
 

Thanks, those are great articles!

However, they don't answer my original question for windows only boot machines where I cannot run mondo rescue.

(Incidently, I'm also investigating the possibility of installing linux and mondo rescue on a flash stick so my daughters new windows notebook can boot from the flash stick and run mondo rescue. However, for the sake of this discussion, lets assume I am unable to make that work.)

My daughter has a new notebook computer with 80GB disk. If I buy a 250GB external drive I can put three images on the USB disk.

Suppose we boot a live linux (such as knoppix) on her new notebook. Is there a tool more powerful than zip and gunzip that can be used to take the 80GB windows NTFS boot partition image on the USB HDD and put it on multiple DVDs so I can later restore from the DVD to the USB drive and then from the USB drive to the notebook's boot drive and then boot windows from the newly restored boot disk?

Thanks,
Siegfried

Look at tar, & its multi-volume options. It also can be told to use either gzip or bzip2. I afraid I can't explain how to use these, just suggest that they are there for your use.