[ltp] Re: Rescue partition needed?

[Bjørn Mork]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> BTW, the only time I bothered to do a "rescue disk" for Windows, I just
> booted into my Debian partition and copied the Windows particion with
> `dd'.  If your Windows partition has a lot of space left, you can
> compact the partition with ntfsresize.

I can recommend ntfsclone as an alternative to dd for this purpose.  The
advantage is that you don't need to resize the partition or compress the
result, retaining the original file system size and keeping the image
mountable:


NTFSCLONE(8)                                                                            NTFSCLONE(8)

NAME
       ntfsclone - Efficiently clone, image, restore or rescue an NTFS

SYNOPSIS
       ntfsclone [OPTIONS] SOURCE
       ntfsclone --save-image [OPTIONS] SOURCE
       ntfsclone --restore-image [OPTIONS] SOURCE
       ntfsclone --metadata [OPTIONS] SOURCE

DESCRIPTION
       ntfsclone  will  efficiently clone (copy, save, backup, restore) or rescue an NTFS filesystem
       to a sparse file, image, device (partition) or standard output.   It  works  at  disk  sector
       level and copies only the used data. Unused disk space becomes zero (cloning to sparse file),
       encoded with control codes (saving in special image format), left  unchanged  (cloning  to  a
       disk/partition) or filled with zeros (cloning to standard output).

       ntfsclone  can be useful to make backups, an exact snapshot of an NTFS filesystem and restore
       it later on, or for developers to test NTFS read/write  functionality,  troubleshoot/investi-
       gate users' issues using the clone without the risk of destroying the original filesystem.

       The  clone,  if  not  using  the  special image format, is an exact copy of the original NTFS
       filesystem from sector to sector thus it can be also mounted  just  like  the  original  NTFS
       filesystem.   For  example if you clone to a file and the kernel has loopback device and NTFS
       support then the file can be mounted as

              mount -t ntfs -o loop ntfsclone.img /mnt/ntfsclone



ntfsclone is part of ntfsprogs in Debian.


Bjørn