Partition Imaging
Due to Microsoft's recent anti-piracy policy it is now essential to clone your system drive partition to avoid reactivation. I recently had to reinstall xp onto the same EXACT machine and still had to call Microsoft and talk to someone in India to get it reactivated. They asked 20 questions and it just wasn't fun. I first looked for a open source solution. Here is what I tried...
PING (partition image is not ghost) - Open Source - http://ping.windowsdream.com/
It is based on RIPLinux and comes in a bootable cd image. It booted up into linux and loaded its command line based interface. It easily worked with my on board 100mbit NIC on my laptop. I copied the image to my desktop machine which is on a gigbit LAN. It took over 2.5 hours to backup a 6GB partition. This seemed way too long and not a viable solution to my problem. I then tried it on my desktop machine and could not get it to work with my raid setup.
Norton Ghost 12 - $70 - http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/
It boots into a dos based GUI but I couldn't get it to work with the NIC in my laptop. I'm not going to mess with floppies and hunting for NIC drivers.
Partimage -Open Source http://www.partimage.org/
This is very similar to PING. About the same results also.
DriveImage - Open Source - http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
This program runs right in windows. It uses Microsoft's volume shadow services to backup a running partition. I ran it on my laptop and with compression on it backed up 6GB in under 30mins to 2.5GB. It automatically deletes the hibernation file, the swap file and it ignores free space. I decided to run it on my desktop machine to see how fast it would go. I have 2 drives in RAID0 pulling 110MB/s(PING couldn't do 100MB/min). With compression on it backed up 12GB partition from one raid to another raid to 5GB in about 15minutes. This amazed me. It can be ran on a usb bootable version of XP or off a live cd version of XP. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Conclusion
Drive image offers by far the best speed and the most options. It does require booting of a usb device or disc to restore the system drive or if the machine has a "dead" OS.
PING (partition image is not ghost) - Open Source - http://ping.windowsdream.com/
It is based on RIPLinux and comes in a bootable cd image. It booted up into linux and loaded its command line based interface. It easily worked with my on board 100mbit NIC on my laptop. I copied the image to my desktop machine which is on a gigbit LAN. It took over 2.5 hours to backup a 6GB partition. This seemed way too long and not a viable solution to my problem. I then tried it on my desktop machine and could not get it to work with my raid setup.
Norton Ghost 12 - $70 - http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/
It boots into a dos based GUI but I couldn't get it to work with the NIC in my laptop. I'm not going to mess with floppies and hunting for NIC drivers.
Partimage -Open Source http://www.partimage.org/
This is very similar to PING. About the same results also.
DriveImage - Open Source - http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
This program runs right in windows. It uses Microsoft's volume shadow services to backup a running partition. I ran it on my laptop and with compression on it backed up 6GB in under 30mins to 2.5GB. It automatically deletes the hibernation file, the swap file and it ignores free space. I decided to run it on my desktop machine to see how fast it would go. I have 2 drives in RAID0 pulling 110MB/s(PING couldn't do 100MB/min). With compression on it backed up 12GB partition from one raid to another raid to 5GB in about 15minutes. This amazed me. It can be ran on a usb bootable version of XP or off a live cd version of XP. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Conclusion
Drive image offers by far the best speed and the most options. It does require booting of a usb device or disc to restore the system drive or if the machine has a "dead" OS.
posted by PhrozenDemon at
1:26 PM
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