NTFS imaging

[Bart Silverstrim]

Dereck Wonnacott wrote:
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> I'm looking for an open source replacement for Norton Ghost. I
> specifically want to image NTFS partitions without having to copy
> unallocated space. Incremental imaging is a plus but not required.
> 
> Any ideas appreciated.

What we do for cloning lab rollouts...

install a system, configure it as desired.

Boot RIPlinux (Rescue-is-possible) with X

use gparted to shrink the partition (some other machines may have 
smaller drives, if all your drives are larger or equal to the clone 
template this isn't a worry)

mount a SMB share, although you should be able to use a USB drive or one 
of a couple other sources to save to.

use partimage to save the partition as a compressed image to 
/mnt/sharename, or wherever you want to store the image. It'll throw a 
warning about NTFS support being experimental; we've rolled out hundreds 
of machines and haven't had a problem with this.

on the destination machine, boot RIPLinux and use partimage to restore 
the image to the blank system.

Use gparted to resize the partition to fill the drive.

Boot Windows, run a freeware program called "newsid" (google it to find 
the download) to give a unique SID to the system and change the name of 
the machine to prevent network collisions with NetBIOS.

Done. Modify as needed if you're looking for make backups instead.

-Bart