Re: [gentoo-user] Waaaaaay [OT] Windoze back-up. Sorry to ask. :-(

[Mick]

On Tuesday 02 May 2006 21:18, Teresa and Dale wrote:

> I want to be able to back her drive up to a CD, the whole thing even if
> it takes a few CDs.  When it dies again, I want to be able to put in the
> first CD and it boot and reinstall everything from there with little
> interaction from me.
>
> Is there such a creature?  Please tell me it is free.  I'm used to Linux
> remember.

First defragment her OS partition a couple of times (and reboot in between for 
good measure ;-).  Then you can use a Knoppix or other Linux LiveCD on her 
machine, run partimage and save an image of her OS partition on one of your 
boxen over the LAN.  If you don't want to take up too much of your valuable 
disk space you can of course compress the image.  If you rather save it on 
CD's/DVD's partimage can split the image down to smaller file sizes.

You can of course also save it on a new partition on her box.

http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

Another tool which you can use from within Windoze is Bart's PE and DriveImage 
XML (a plugin you can build into Bart's PE LiveCD).

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

They're both free and should do the job you want.  Personally,  I use Knoppix 
and partimage, but there are other linux tools (down to the relatively basic 
dd command) which should do the trick on a VFAT partition.
-- 
Regards,
Mick