[Techtalk] report on shiny new Thinkpad, or, Windows sux worse than ever

[Conor Daly]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 02:18:59AM -0700 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Elena Bevell thought:
> 
> I have been experimenting with using Linux to reimage XP.
> Maybe something like this could work for you.  I boot the
> computer with a Linux rescue disk, rsync -avz all the files to another
> machine, rm -r * all the files in the Windows partition and 
> then rsync the files back.  This seems to work, even if the partition size
> has been changed.  The problem is that you need to use the oldstyle
> vfat instead of the ntfs filesystem.  (I have heard that mandrake can
> write to a ntfs filesystem, but I have not tried this yet.)

Check out http://www.mondorescue.org  Mondoarchive is a full featured
backup and disaster recovery system.  It will bare-metal restore any
(linux, BSD, MSwin) system from CD, NFS server, tape...  It handles NTFS
partitions by doing a "ghost" image since it cannot write individual files
there.  The current devel branch has code to image only the _data-filled_
parts of the NTFS partition thus reducing the image size.

Using mondoarchive to back up your newly installed XP, after you install
linux also, will allow you to do the equivalent of the "restore" CD[0]
without losing the linux stuff...

Conor

[0] "fsck off" CD
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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