Hi,
The intro to this is off-topic, but the question isn't. It's a bit long
winded, but it does illustrate why we prefer Linux. Feel free to jump down to
the problem below if you don't want to read about the saga :-)
My wife's MSI Laptop popped its clogs a week or two back and after a bit of
investigative work, I realised that the hard disc had failed. In fact this
diagnosis was much harder than it needed to be because I couldn't find a
hardisk diagnosis tool that would run properly on Win7 and the disc
manufacturer's test disc claimed that it couldn't find a compatible disc.
In the end I booted the machine from the PartedMagic disc and used their disc
testing tool and Bob's your Uncle. Novatech were their usual helpful selves
and told us to return it to them for repair because it was inside the MSI 2
year warranty (not theirs) and a few days alter we had a nice new disc with
Win7 SP2 installed. So far so good.
Now for the problem. That miserable company, Microsoft, no longer allow OEMs
to include a Windows Installation disc with their computers and they don't
allow them to create one either (they are currently suing Comet over this).
What they do allow is that the OEMs can put a recovery partition on the disc
and provide a program for the user to create a recovery DVD from it. When the
laptop was new, we used this program to create a Win 7 Recovery DVD, (which we
still have).
Win7 is now at SP2 of course and Novatech re-imaged the machine with their SP2
image. Being a conscientious type, I thought I would redo the recovery DVD,
but Windows burner exited with a Windows system error (0x80004005), which
basically translates to 'I haven't got a clue'). After wasting lots of dual-
layer DVDs, I came to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with the DVD
writer, the problem is somewhere in Windows.
Being an obstinate type, I wasn't going to be defeated by crappy Windows
software, so I looked around for another way. I thought I had the answer!
Using PartedMagic, I would create an image of the recovery partition, burn
that to a dual-layer DVD from within PartedMagic and then, if the hardisk
failed again, we could restore it. Only one problem; the partition is 12.5
Gigs (and is nearly full) and the DVD can only take 8.5 GB. Even that seemed
surmountable; both Clonezilla and PartImage can do compressed images, so I
gave them a try.
I started with PartImage, but it warned me that NTFS support is experimental,
so I went over to Clonezilla. Neither tool can burn to the DVD directly, so I
created a 15 GB partition at the end of the hardisk and formatted it to ext2.
Clonezilla went all the way through and then exited with a bunch of error
messages I couldn't make head or tail of. There was nothing usable in the
target partition.
I then tried PartImage again and ignored the Warning about NTFS support. This
went almost all the way through, but stopped with the message that the disc
was full and where should it put the second volume.
So (at long last) here is the question. Why does PartImage need a bigger
partition to store its image into than the one it came from, even though I am
using compression?
Secondary question; is it creating temporary files in the target directory?
If so, how much bigger does the target partition need to be?
I've Read The Fine Manual. It doesn't say much.
--
Terry Coles
64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux
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