Disk cloning

[Keith]

I'm looking for a free disk cloning program that will copy my entire hdd to a network computer. It needs to boot from a cd and can put the image on a network share preferably compressed and cant be os specific.  I found some but they dont do what i want. Anyone know of a good one?

[Sparda]

Any linux live CD that supports your netowrk card (I recommend Ubuntu :D) which will give you use of the dd and netcat commands.

On the receiving computer run some thing like:

netcat -l -p 8673 >> hdimagefile

On the transmitting computer:

dd if=/dev/hda | netcat -n <ip of computer> -p 8673

This is perhaps the simplest method, but it has a few issues. For one, if the reciving computer receives any traffic on port 8673 that will make it's way in to the image.

May be my methodology is completely wrong, I mean, I'v never done this my self, but there's no particular reason it won't work that I can see :P

[Shaun]

I've fairly certain that -n isn't needed, and that -p is wrong for the transmitting computer, it should just be "netcat <ip> <port>" (although netcat is usually called nc rather than netcat in my experience).

[Keith]

Ok if i did it that way how would i restore the image?

Also kinda off topic but if i had a file with one name per line, how could i rename a bunch of folders to match those in the file?

[cooper]

Ok if i did it that way how would i restore the image?

Boot off a live CD that has netcat on it (most Linuxes out there probably do. The security distros are sure to).

On the image hosting computer

dd if=hddimage | nc -l -p 8763

And on the machine you want to image:

nc <ip> -p 8763 | dd of=/dev/hdX

Also kinda off topic but if i had a file with one name per line, how could i rename a bunch of folders to match those in the file?

I don't understand the question. Going through a file one line at a time is easy, but how do you see the 'renaming a bunch of folders' part? Does the file contain foldernames that should have some text prepended or something? What?

[Keith]

I want to rename some folders based on what is in the file. For example the file contains the following.

ABC

ABCD

ABCDE

....

And the folders are

1

2

3

4

....

Is it possible to have a script read the file and rename folder 1 to ABC, folder 2 to ABCD, 3 to ABCDE, etc....?

[cooper]

for word in `cat file`
do COUNTER=$(($COUNTER + 1))
    mv /path/to/"$word" /path/to/$COUNTER
done

Set the IFS variable to just newlines to allow the word variable to be the full line.

[Shaun]

I'd just like to point out again that you don't use the -p argument to specify the port to connect to on the computer acting as a client.

[xPAKxMaster]

you can also use ghost symantec  if you dont know how to use linux.... 8)

[SomeoneE1se]

you can also use ghost symantec  if you dont know how to use linux.... 8)

On digg there was an ISO for disk clone and gparted.  Plus a bunch of tools for what you're trying to do.

[xPAKxMaster]

oh yeah i saw that

is it still there?

my friend has been looking for that..

[Guest requiemnoise]

free

http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

if you got to have Windows feel and got some cash,

http://www.acronis.com/

The older versions of Ghost was good till year 2001. Now, it is a bloated piece of shit.

[unasoto]

I used G4U and I like it it save the image useing ftp http://fbim.fh-regensburg.de/~feyrer/g4u/

[xPAKxMaster]

sweet, thanks guys