LinuxQuestions.org - tar WinVista partition and restore later?

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tar WinVista partition and restore later?

Has anyone tried this and report on success/failure:

/dev/sda3 contains a Windows Vista installation (yeuch, but the computer came with it pre-installed and someday I might want to play with it).

Code:

mkdir /mnt/tmp

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/tmp

cd  /mnt/tmp

tar zcvf /path/to/external/drive/vista.tar.gz .

And then later restoring the above to /dev/sda3 (the same partition) on the same computer - except the /dev/sda3 partition has been resized smaller prior to the restore? The above tar command appeared to work without error (of course I couldn't catch everything that scrolled by!) and it's exit value was zero - indicating success.

I want to try tar because I don't have any imaging software (Ghost, TrueImage, etc.) that is a recent enough version for me to trust it imagining whatever slightly new flavor of NTFS Vista uses. I don't see why tar wouldn't work, but I've never tried tar'ing/restoring an entire Windows OS installation before. Does it work? I'll have to format the resized partition before the restore, and all's I have with Vista on it is the Dell "recovery disk". So if that doesn't let me do a simple format in Vista's flavor of NTFS I might have some problems. Also, does Linux NTFS write support handle the Vista flavor of NTFS without problem? I am assuming that Vista has it's own "new" flavor of NTFS, but maybe it doesn't and Linux can format the partition for me just as well.

Thanks!

If you follow the links provided in this thread you'll see how to make a compressed image of only allocated data using dd and gzip. Not sure how it will work restoring to a smaller partition.
I know the software I use will only restore to the same size partition as what the image was made in, can be anywhere on the drive though.

Quote:

Also, does Linux NTFS write support handle the Vista flavor of NTFS without problem?

I'm thinking...NO.
But that's just "thinking", I say so because I'm sure Microsoft has patents on many features of the newest NTFS file system that others can't touch, that Vista uses.

No, no, no, no ...
Read this recent similar thread.

ntfsclone will give you an effective backup. Use it.