On 11/26/2009 11:23 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Chris Bennett<chris AT ceegeebee DOT com>  
> wrote:
>    
>>> There would also be the additional (and potentially not trivial)
>>> work to get clonezilla to run on an active windows system. I'm not
>>> sure if it can read all the NTFS metada from a shadow copy but there
>>> has to be some way to do it since Norton Ghost is able to clone a
>>> live system using some type of shadow copy.
>>>        
>>      
> Yes, the idea would be to have a minimal base image of the OS that you
> would not have to update, or at least not frequently, along with a
> bare-metal re-installer that you would boot from CD.  But, I'm not
> sure if anyone knows exactly what needs to be in this image for
> Windows or whether you have to update it after installing windows
> updates.
>
>    
I have cloned Windows systems (win 2k to XP) by using sysrescucd.  First 
I would use ntfsresize to re-size the file system to the smalist disk I 
would restore to.  This is not necessary if you will always use the same 
disk size or larger.  Then I would copy the first 100 megs or so (not 
really sure how much is necessary but this amount allways worked) using 
dd.  If the destination disk was a different size I would use fdisk to 
resize the c: partition to the size of the new disk making sure the 
partition always started at the same block as the original.  If the size 
is the same I would use fdisk to write the the original partition table 
back so the kernel would know the disk partition table changed (this 
saves a reboot since the dd copy process copies a new partition table 
also).  Next I would use ntfsclone to clone the whole ntfs file system. 
   ntfsclone just copies the data and directory structure so it is 
usually pretty fast.  If the disk is bigger than the original I would 
use ntfsresize to resize the ntfs file system to the new partition.

This seems pretty complicated but I used a script to automate the 
process.  I used this at a local school system to create classroom 
images saved to Linux server that I could later use to populate all the 
computers in a class.   The 2 files for each image were compressed with 
gzip and transferred with ssh to and from the Linux server.  Check out 
the documentation that comes with ntfsclone to see examples.

...Bob

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