[Tfug] ISO Ghost 8 (2003?)

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Chris,

On 3/30/2014 8:13 PM, chris whitman wrote:
> I guess parted isn't free anymore. I've used cloneziila in the past also.
> It's been in development for quite awhile now.
> http://clonezilla.org/

Yes, I use Clonezilla on my own *personal* systems -- with a
"bare" external (USB) drive in a removable carrier (i.e., so
each of my systems has a bare drive that contains a restorable
image of that system in its pristine state; I store these
bare "image drives" in a shoebox so they're all in one place).

I had thought of scripting partclone (or partimag... not sure which
is present there) so that I could make a set of DVD/CD's from which
the user could restore their system.  But, that means the user has
to treat those as "precious" (IME, users "misplace" their restore
disks with some regularity!).

OTOH, storing the image *on* the actual system medium (aka a "restore"
partition) eliminates that possibility of "misplacement" (trading it,
instead, for the risk of a catastrophic disk failure!).

I could use any number of tools to store an image directly onto the
medium that it is imaging.  But, also have to ensure the resulting
partition is bootable (to invoke the restore script) *and* not
accessible from the running/restored system (lest the user accidentally
overwrite some portion of it).

E.g., I could build a system, defragment it, fill all unused space
with "some (highly compressible) constant", then just:
    dd | gzip > /dev/hiddenpartition/image.gz
keeping the restore operation dirt cheap (i.e., not requiring
hundreds of megabytes to boot an OS, GUI *and* restore app!)

OTOH, the machines already have a (hidden) restore partition and
the scripts, graphics, etc. to make it all work.  All I need to do
is drop a new set of .GHO files onto that hidden partition (after
resizing it to accommodate them) and things should work out-of-the-box.
"Professional looking" instead of a kludge.

I think I've located a copy of the ghost executable.  I just have to
make time to play with it and build the image files (making sure I
have installed every app, update, etc. before doing so!).  Once that
is done, I can image the entire disk -- including the hidden partition
and partition table -- and clone it onto the rest of the machines.

--don