System Restore for Linux ( ISO or Ghost ) Imaging???

[DaveLembke]

Looking for a way to image my Linux systems and burn the image to DVD-R's. Currently I have one of my sytems set up with dual boot Windows 2000 / Fedora core 6 and use the Norton Ghost 2003 from within the Windows 2000 installation to image the entire hard drive with multiple partitions.

The problem with Ghost though is that it can not determine real data from empty space on the Linux partitions so even though Linux may be consuming say 6GB of 20GB and the drive is a 40GB Drive and Windows 2000 is consuming 3GB, the image ends up being spanned to DVD-Rs amounting to 23GB, 14GB of which is empty HD space on the Linux partitions which is very wasteful.

The Windows 2000 installation on this system is pretty much just there to support imaging of the system.

I'd like to be able to create a bootable restore CD or DVD set for a clean Linux build vs this hokey dual boot solution which works but is very sloppy in that it is very wasteful.

So what solutions are out there for this need? Is it a matter of creating an ISO image of this Linux system and buring that to CD or DVD? If so what to use and how.

Thanks

[banjo67xxx]

Knoppix is the ideal recovery CD for linux, and I've just seen that there's a dump/restore tool for ext2/ext3 on SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/projects/dump/ or you could just use tar.

If you have a remote system available then its simple to just boot from Knoppix then restore via TCP from the remote system's tape/disk/DVD.

I've not tried ejecting the Knoppix CD whilst booted from it, but I guess if you've cached everyting you need into memory using sticky bits you might be able to build dump/restore into a Knoppix CD which you can then eject to insert the rest of the DVDs with the data on them?

If you try this, let me know how it goes?

[Dias de verano]

The problem with Ghost though is that it can not determine real data from empty space on the Linux partitions so even though Linux may be consuming say 6GB of 20GB and the drive is a 40GB Drive and Windows 2000 is consuming 3GB, the image ends up being spanned to DVD-Rs amounting to 23GB, 14GB of which is empty HD space on the Linux partitions which is very wasteful.

Even with max compression? Which Ghost version?

[DaveLembke]

Ghost 2003

[Dias de verano]

Ghost 2003

I asked if you had used compression in Ghost also you didn't say what distro (version) of Linux you are using, and importantly, what filesystem you are using on the linux partition. Ghost 2003 compressed image mode works with ext2 and ext3 but may have trouble with later filesystems such as reiserfs (used with SuSe Linux)

Symantec Knowledge Base article containing Ghost & Linux compatibility tables:

http://tinyurl.com/4wrdlu

[DaveLembke]

Thanks Dias for the info and tinyurl link to the compatability of Ghost 2003 with specific distros, and sorry for the lack there of of info in my prior post.

 I was using Dual Boot Windows 2000 Pro and Fedora Core 5 when I experienced this issue. As far as partiton type I am thinking it was not the normal Linux Partition but a more secure partition type...Might have been XFS

My Recent build is 2000 Pro and Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop Distro. I havent tried ghosting yet with this build. Maybe I will have better luck given that the default file system is used with Ubuntu than my Fedora core 5 build of the prior system that ate up DVDs with empty space burned to them.