[plug] "Ghost" for Linux?

[Nick Bannon]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 04:36:59PM +0800, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> Maybe I should've been less vague. ^_^
> I know I can use dd, etc, but I'd rather have a tool that doesn't archive
> unused disk space, and also a complete management tool... and my PRIMARY
> reason for using this is to back up my old Win98 partition. Or more to the
> point, back up a fresh clean install of Win98.

Ah - for this I use dd/gzip. It's not particularly fast, but works well
and requires no extra tools.

dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=1M | gzip -1v > /space/hda1_freshwin98.gz

If it's a fresh install (ie you haven't filled the partition with files
then deleted them all) all the unused space will compress to pretty much
nothing.

[...]
> Oh yes. What's prompted this right now (that I've been putting off for
> ages) is that I have another HDD with a FAT drive that Linux works fine
> with, but Windows no longer recognises and keeps asking if I want it
> formatted!! (Has anyone seen this before?)
[...]

Windows doesn't understand complicated partition tables - maybe that's
it. Back up the partition table, delete everything but the FAT
partition, make sure Windows is happy, then restore the partition table?

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal