Experiences w/ Drive Imaging Software?

Futurepower(R) asks: "Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have crippled file systems. The file system cannot copy some of the files that are necessary to the operating system. If you don't have experience with Microsoft operating systems, you may find this amazing, but it is true; Microsoft supplies no method of backing up and restoring fully operational copies of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Microsoft's advice is to reinstall the operating system and all programs every time you want to move to a new or backup computer. For confirmation of this, see the 'Microsoft Policy Statement' in the article, The Microsoft Policy Concerning Disk Duplication of Windows XP Installations. Many industries use numerous programs; installing them all may take a week or even more. All of the disk image duplication programs I've used have problems, in my experience. What program do you use? What has been your experience with it? Can you recommend a program, or recommend staying away from one?"

"This policy of providing no way to backup and restore a fully installed system is impossible for corporations, of course. So Microsoft technical support representatives recommend sector-by-sector disk image duplication, even though it is against Microsoft policy. Copying each sector of a hard drive bypasses Microsoft's copy protection by which Microsoft punishes all users, even if they are honest.

Sometimes Microsoft technical support recommends using 'third-party' disk image programs. For example, sometimes support representatives recommend using Symantec Ghost.

All of the disk image duplication programs I've used have problems, in my experience. So, here's a question: What program do you use? What has been your experience with it? Can you recommend a program, or recommend staying away from one?

Here are my experiences:

Symantec Ghost sometimes fails with non-specific error messages. Uninstalling Ghost does not uninstall all the Ghost software. Symantec is one of the companies using copy protection, so using Symantec products may be a case of jumping from the Microsoft frying pan to the Symantec copy protection fire; also, you have no assurance that the copy protection will not become worse in the future.

PowerQuest DriveImage and DeployCenter have an uncertain future. PowerQuest was bought by Symantec. This was after PowerQuest released DriveImage 7 with problems. The sale cannot be a happy event for those who spent hundreds of dollars on DeployCenter.

I've tried Acronis True Image. I've had better luck with it than with Symantec or PowerQuest products. However, like the others, it sometime gives non-specific error messages that say something like, 'I've failed, and I'm not going to tell you how to troubleshoot the problem.'

Fred Langa, publisher of LangaList, recommends BootIt. I have no experience with it.

I haven't tried g4u, free, open source software provided under the BSD license g4u has the drawback that it writes only through FTP. There is no way to write to a network drive or a CD-R.

It's disgusting; people just want to make functional backups, but to do it they are dragged over the coals."

Skip hardware, go software

[mixy1plik]

I have used Partitionmagic and Copy Commander, but neither has ever been successful. I was charged with the task of setting up 25+ client machines with some proprietary ASP.net apps to run remotely at client sites, with Windows XP. All the machines were identical, hardware wise. It made NO sense to set each one up individually. We purchased one of these: Logicube Echo [logicube.com]. If you have the means to purchase this $500+ device, I highly recommend doing so. I did a mirror copy of the 40GB HDs in these machines and within 2 days had all 25 machines up and running. Essentially, the single installation of XP I copied was duped bit by bit. Each drive took about 40-60 minutes to dupe. It's truly a process of plug in two drives and hit copy. The catch is, all XP installs were under the same serial number- however- we purchased a copy of XP for each system so I have a legit license for each instance.

Microsoft's policy with duping/copying is FUCKING INANE. I've switched PCI cards in my home PC only to have it flip out and require a repair install of XP on top of everything. It's just plain stupid. That poor Windows XP activation operator woman at midnight a few Saturdays ago...she got a piece of my mind.

Two functional methods...

[dmayle]

Two things you can do are to customise an OS install using the "OEM" section to do the installs for you, or use a deployment system like Tivoli, Unicenter, or Vision64...

Ghost worked fine for us

[Pike65]

Well at the place I used to work IT at we used an older version of Norton Ghost and had no problems with it. I can't check what version it was because it won't run under Windows and I don't have a machine I can reboot right now. 7.0? Something like that.

Either way, just whip the top off the box, stick in your drive with the image on and use Ghost on a boot disk. Never had a problem with Windows 95, 98 or 2k, including NTFS.

Pulling images down off the network was a bit of a chore, as it'd fail if the lag got too high . . .

Re:Experiences with Norton Ghost

[QuantumRiff]

We run Symantec Ghost enterprise here, and the one thing that really bugs me is ghosting multiple machines at a time. We are a college, so our labs have 30 machines each. When i try to ghost the whole lab at once, i have anywhere from 4-12 of these machines drop out mid process. Then i have to use the network boot disk and manually do the rest. Its still a hell of a lot faster then building them up by hand, but I wish i could figure out why the machines crap out partway through.

Overkill

[GreatDave]

All the people suggesting dd are absolutely right. It's simple and it works. And you can put a regular file for "of" if you want to create a disk image file.

I don't see why g4u's use of FTP for uploading drive images is that bad. Surely it isn't hard to throw up a Linux box running an ftp daemon, or enable FTP on IIS on your NT box.

I for one don't even bother with Symantec products anymore. If you know how to use Linux or BSD, fixing Windows problems through them is a snap. And from the looks of it, I'm glad I stopped supporting Symantec. They've become dirty with their DRM, and they haven't updated many of the Norton SystemWorks tools for Windows XP.

At the risk of sounding arrogant... Ghost and friends have devolved into handholders for Unix-illiterate MCSEs. Phooey, Symantec.

My recommendation

[djupedal]

Chassis your Windows drive into a Mac and image/clone it via CarbonCopy Cloner [versiontracker.com], Retrospect [dantz.com], etc. 100% mirror, no problem.

Everybody uses Ghost.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Maybe Symantec has copy protection bullshit, but I've never once seen Ghost carp about licenses. And I can't imagine it was because the IT dept was doing their job properly (at a former place of work).

There are a few things that you don't want to duplicate exactly when you're installing on a bunch of machines, even with identical hardware. If I understand correctly, that's the whole point of Ghost. dd doesn't always cut it if you're doing 400 installs on separate machines.

Re:dd

[gpinzone]

Do the partitions need to be the same? If they're not what happens?

vmware

[NynexNinja]

use vmware and image the disk as one big .vmx file... when the stuff breaks, just copy a vmx file across the network and you're done.

Novell ZenWorks Imaging

[I_am_Rambi]

Working for computer services for my university, we have recently dropped Ghost for Novell ZenWorks imaging. This is a linux based imaging software, that I think is fairly simple, if you don't mind typing. example:

For a image residing on a server that you want to bring down:
img restorep server //server/path/to/image/file

The only issue that I have ran acrossed is that sometimes it will give the wrong error. I've received the error that it couldn't find the server, but it was a hard drive issue. I think though this is an easy imaging software, and if you are up for fun, its seems that you can edit some of the config files to automatically image stuff, but I'm not for certain.

Re:use the software mirror

[TheRaven64]

If you use SCSI, or some other system that supports removable drives (such as an external USB2 or FireWire disk), it should be possible to hot swap a pair (or more) of drives, and take all but the one currently running the backup off site, so if your windows machine is a server (stranger things have happened. I saw someone using BeOS* as a web server recently) you don't have to put up with the downtime while you swap drives. Of course, when I say should, I've never tried it. If it isn't then you'd be better off getting a hardware SCSI raid controller which supports hot swapping and automatic regeneration, and using that.

* Not to detract from BeOS. With the possible exception of OS X, it's the nicest desktop OS I've ever used, but it was never meant for the server (one of the reasons it works so well on the desktop).

Re:Experiences with Norton Ghost

[JakeSpencer]

I work at the University of Oklahoma, and our department uses ghost in a similar manner to that described above. We received many new Dells this summer. We set up one the way we wanted them all to be, used sysprep to make sure everything went cleanly, then pulled the image off the machine with ghost. We then push the image over the network to all of the machines. All that remains is to go rename the machines, but we've recently come up with a batch file that can do this automatically by mac address. Ghost is good.

Re:Experiences with Norton Ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

The bluescreen issue probally isn't copy protection. The "copy protection" should be Product Activation kicking in and not allowing you to do anything (on non-corporate OSes). What you're probally experiencing is in fact a HAL issue. Your original system probally uses an APIC HAL and the second machine probally uses an older PIC HAL. (or some other similar type of situation, APM is a dirty whore in HAL's eyes).

Here's a solution

[Kazymyr]

Backburner [kilgallonfamily.com] will backup anything you throw at it. It's a collection of Perl scripts, thus very small. It can backup and restore partitions or raw disks, with or without compression. It can write the backup to multiple CDs. You can even send it over the network to a NFS mounted volume. Been using it for over 3 years with no problem whatsoever.

Dantz Retrospect for Windows

[greed]

While this isn't drive imaging software per se, it does handle the restore a system to an operating state feature. Dantz Retrospect has an add-on [dantz.com] which they say can make a bootable disaster-recovery CD which will regenerate any client of the Retrospect backup server. AFTER the client has failed.

I've never used that feature, as my primary use of Retrospect is on Macintosh; I have a Windows client, but have not had to try to regenerate it following a total system loss. (And I don't have the add-on to do it anyway.)

But the rest of Retrospect is common across Windows and Mac. (Disaster recovery on Mac seems to be a lot easier.) The important part for this discussion, in addition to the 'disaster recovery CD' add-on, is the way it does a so-called 'snapshot' when it takes an incremental backup. This lets you get both the speed of doing incremental backups, plus the ability to restore a system to precisely the contents it had at that time. (So basically, it can handle deletes too, so it doesn't need to restore files from the full backup which were deleted when a later backup took place.)

I bought Retrospect for Macintosh after Norton 'Crash Gaurd Causes Crashes' Utilities removed their backup/restore software in a newer version. (Fortunately, the id10ts at Symantec offered a satisfaction guarantee on software. The store didn't believe it, they had to place a toll call to Symantec to find out they weren't kidding.)

I've been using Retrospect for Macintosh since System 8 came out, through OS X, and now with a Windows 98 client. It's my very favourite backup program, and what's more, the restores work.

Just need to get the upgrade to 5.1 for Mac so I don't need a separate backup system for my Linux box.

Re:Fully automated NT, 2K and XP OS and app instal

[moquist]

I also worked on JACAL at Taylor University (www.css.tayloru.edu).

Here are a few more details about the system:

The Linux installation runs and completes first, without requiring any reboots, of course. Then the Windows installation proceeds, automatically rebooting and continuing several times.

To start the JACAL process, the administrator only needs to input the hostname of the workstation, and select two or three menu options having to do with partitioning and whether the machine is to single-boot (Linux or Windows) or dual-boot.

Linux Installation:

We had a "base" Red Hat installation shared via NFS to the JACAL workstations (that is, workstations currently going through the JACAL install process), and this installation was rsynced to each installation target, where hardware detection and the admin-entered hostname were used to customize certain files. The rest was cake.

Windows Installation:

The real work was here, of course. :)
To get the installation files, we let a Windows installation progress to the point where it starts paying attention to what hardware is on the system (that would be the second or third reboot, IIRC). We powered off the machine at that point and used 'dd' to grab the boot partition of the drive, and made a tarball of all the files on the Windows partition.

After a lot of guesswork, trials, and errors, we developed a short script that knows which bits of the Windows boot partition are machine-independent, so for each workstation going through the JACAL process, JACAL un-tars the tarball onto the newly formatted (fat32) partition and copies the bits it will need to boot and continue the Windows installation. It also copies a chain of Perl scripts into the c:\temp folder. Then it reboots, and for the rest of the JACAL process the machine is running Windows.

Using the RunOnce registry key, we started a Perl script that used sysdiff (and other various things) to install applications hosted on a SAMBA share. That perl script would then set RunOnce to run the next perl script, and then reboot. The next perl script would install the video driver, set RunOnce again, and reboot. The next one did some substitutions in c:\winnt\system.ini (or something like that) to enable SMP, and rebooted. Etc.

Since I was there I know they've updated the entire applications installation process (SysDiff can't do *everything*), and they're running XP now instead of NT 4.0.

I know that we were interested in making this more of an open-source project while I was there, but getting Windows to install this easily takes quite a bit of work to implement; there's no easy way to just pack up an all-inclusive tarball and send it off to somebody else, especially since a lot of the essential pieces are copies of non-free software packages. But I know that JACAL saves Taylor's CompSci department hours and hours of clicking through dialog boxes each year. (Need to fix a machine's configuration? Just sit down with a JACAL bootdisk for 5 minutes and the problem is solved 45 minutes later!)

I think it would be great if more people could start to make use of the work that's been done, so it could be this easy for everyone.

Re:Fully automated NT, 2K and XP OS and app instal

[NathanE]

I am the current maintainer of JACAL at Taylor University and there are several changes we've made to the system since the NT4 days.

- We are using a product called PrismPack from Lanovation instead of SysDiff. It is quite a bit easier and quicker to use and we can also use it to deploy new applications and system changes via login scripts without the user having administrator privileges.

- We are using AutoIt instead of ScriptIt for any GUI scripting for the few applications that don't like to be packaged with PrismPack (some applications do some kind of hardware ID-ing so you can't take a prebuilt package from one machine to another).

It works really well for us even across lots of different hardware configurations.

Drive Image - use early versions

[LandGator]

PowerQuest's DRIVE IMAGE PRO has a bug in later versions, 4 & 5 (AKA DeployCenter). Even though an NT machine was partitioned once (4GB HD) with FDISK and no other partitioning software was used, I still get "Error 128" which self-identfies as being caused by OnTrack or other partitioning software.

PowerQuest TS was useless, but comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage led me to salvation. Praise USENET!

Solution? Use Drive Image 2. Works every time.

Re:Sorta

[HiThere]

...We do have ghost, but that is a pain to get working on a network, due to the fundamental limitations of DOS in that regard.

Interesting. That's the usual way it was done at the shop where I worked. The ghost images were stored out on a Novell Netware server in, I believe, the directory Login, which is read accessible before you log into the network. (This was on a machine that had no routable TCP/IP address, so only locally accessible.) ghost from a floppy customized with the right ethernet driver accessed the image and downloaded it to the local HD. (A different procedure, naturally, was used to create the images.) It worked without hitch on the OSs that I installed that way, but as the were all MSWin9x this isn't too relevant. But the ghost usage was easy.