Ghost for Unix

G4U is a disk cloning tool. I use it to back up windows machines before I put them into the wild.

G4U homepage

Quick reference

G4U is build over netbsd. Various options are supported and help / documentation is available from the command line:

  # displays help screen
help
  # resets console back to initial logon
ctrl-D

There are two commands available for uploading the system to an FTP server. One will upload the whole disk, the other can be used to backup just one partition.

  # to upload the whole of the first IDE disk (wd0) to the ftp server on 10.10.10.3
  # password for the ftpuser account is prompted for
uploaddisk ftpuser@10.10.10.3 my_file_name.gz wd0
  # upload the first partition
uploadpart 10.10.10.3 c_drive.gz wd0e

You'll need the following commands to find your way around the system and device names. IDE disks are called wd0, wd1 etc., partitions are given letters: 'd' is the whole disk, 'e' is the first partition.

  # list all disks
disks
  # lists partitions on disk wd0
parts wd0 
  # check network configuration
  # useful to check your hardware is supported
ifconfig -a 

Freeing up space

I use the perl script on the G4U home page to fill up the disk with the same, easily compressable, data. I wanted to make sure I wasn't wasting time with the swap file as well.

Windows XP

Its probably worth turning off the hibernate file, in the control panel power applet.

You can turn off the swap file on Windows XP Pro.

• Control Panel | System | Advanced tab | Performance Settings

• Then select the Advanced tab, and Change in the Virtual Memory panel.

• Select 'No paging file' and press set

• Reboot

• Clean up the disk

• Set the swapfile back (I suggest reserving a good chunk; say 4GB). pagefile.sys will appear with the required size, but it doesn't have time to fill it with noise.

• Shut down and image the system.

Windows 2000

Windows 2000 only lets you set the swap file very small, not turn it off.

• Control Panel | System | Advanced tab | Performance Settings

• Then select the Advanced tab, and Change in the Virtual Memory panel.

• Select 'No paging file' and press set

• Reboot

• Clean up the disk

• Set the swapfile back (I suggest reserving a good chunk; say 4GB). pagefile.sys will appear with the required size, but it doesn't have time to fill it with noise.

• Shut down and image the system.

Stats

Note to self. Restoring into VMware, clear down the disk image before doing a restore, otherwise the restore takes twice as long. 2CPU probably makes it a little quicker, but its not worth abandoning a restore just for that.

Windows XP Pro image; 38166mb disk transferred at 10.79mb/s. Compressed to 3199.3mb, making transfer rate 9267kb/s. Time: 58:56. Intel Pentium 4 2391.54mhz; fxp0 network driver.

• Restored into vmware. 2cpu (Intel Xeon 2790.99mhz) 512mb. FTP transfer across the backplane. 38166mb @12.28mb/s; 3199mb transferred in 51:47 (1.02 MB/s). Results in 5.47GB vmware footprint. Windows boots and requires reactivation.

Windows 2K Pro image; 19092mb disk transferred at 7.41mb/s. Compressed to 1722.7mb, making transfer rate 704kb/s. Time: 42:55. AMD Athlon (thunderbird) 1403.3mhz; rtk0 network driver.

• Restored into vmware. 1cpu (Intel Xeon 2790.99mhz) 512mb. FTP transfer across the backplane. 19092mb @9.02mb/s; 1722mb transferred in 35:15 (858.09 KB/s). Results in 3.3GB vmware footprint. Image boots but windows 2000 doesn't like the hardware change.

Windows XP Pro image; 38154mb disk transferred at 10.58mb/s. Compressed to 6729.5mb, making transfer rate 1.86mb/s. Time: 1:00:04. Intel Pentium M 1798.56mhz; makphy0 network driver.

Windows XP home image; 107gb disk transferred at 10.26mb/s. Compressed to 12.2gb, making transfer rate 1.16mb/s. Time: 2:58:02. AMD Athlon (Sempron 2800+) 1999.87mhz; vr0 network driver.

Windows XP home image; 6532mb disk transferred at 6.58mb/s. Compressed to 1904mb, making transfer rate 1.91mb/s. Time: 16:32. AMD K7 (Athlon) 2411.12mhz; makphy0/nfe0 network driver.

Windows XP home image; 38460mb C: partition transferred at 15.56mb/s. Compressed to 3101mb, making transfer rate 1.85mb/s. Time: 41:09. AMD K7 (Athlon) 2411.12mhz; makphy0/nfe0 network driver.