Hi,

I do have Ubuntu 7.10 and I wanted to image this using my NTFS formated Harddisk drive (Unfortunately, my dad formatted the drive using Windows XP). The drive now has a lot of files and I don't want to copy it again and reformat the drive to ext3 just for me to image my workstation. What distribution should I use to image my workstation? I heard Linux couldn't write to NTFS partition. I am hoping that there's a LiveCD that can write on NTFS partition. Basically, I use dd command to image my workstation. Any help? Thanks.

it costs money but acronis can write to ntfs

Linux can now write to ntfs....but there may (I say may as I do not have it) still be issues with it.

as you can see partimage is not yet successful http://www.partimage.org/Supported-Filesystems

as its free you can try a recent edition of partimage on live cd that updates frequently, I recommend.... recovery is possible (RIP) but I do not know the level of gui or CLI you are comfortable with?

Hi,

Another option will be Clonezilla, it's based on partimage and other proyects, AFAIK, it has better ntfs support than partimage (I haven't tried so I cannot say if that's indeed true). You can check out the home page of the proyect.




Regards

Just put another extra drive in your pc, copy all the date eg. using linux / windows. Use this drive as a backup. Install linux on the primary drive and copy all the data back to your primary drive. Doing this with imaging software would be really risky.

I used dd before and it never failed me. It's just that I needed to copy it on ntfs partition. What I wanted to have is a distro which I can boot and can write to my external USB drive formatted using NTFS. I am downloading Clonezilla right now. Does someone have tried this before? Please let me know if it's good. Thanks.

If you only need to copy files from linux to a ntfs partition, most distros have in their repositories the ntfs3g package which is pretty stable to write ntfs' formatted partition. Ubuntu has that package so you could simply mount like this:
Or use the fstab with:


Regards