MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Best way to clone and restore hard drive?

> > That's not even true: the MS Backup tool will not copy unused blocks whether they're
> > zeroed or not as it's NTFS-aware. Disk2vhd isn't the same thing as the MS Backup
> > utility.
>
> Hmm not my experience but maybe they fixed something recently.

This was with the Backup utility on stock Windows 7 Pro - are you sure you're talking about the Backup utility and not the Disk2vhd utility that redk referred to? Disk2vhd may show the behaviour you describe.

> > > I think one of the requirements of the MS backup tool is a separate drive.
> >
> > No, you can back up to any partition that you aren't making part of the backup.
>
> Yeah that is what I said. You can not set the backup drive to the same one you are
> backing up. You can also only clone 1 drive. The rest can only be file backup. Unless
> I am missing some setting. Remember Home!=Ultimate when it comes to the backup util.

When you say "drive" do you mean another partition, or another disk? You can't create an image of a partition on the same partition, that would make no sense at all. But you can make an image of a partition on another partition on the same disk. Windows 7 Pro allows you to image whichever partitions you want, not only the boot volume.

> > > I have done the linux command cat a few times to compress the drive too.
> Something
> > > like 'cat /dev/hdb > gzip -9 back.zip'
> >
> > The standard filename extension for gzip files is '.gz' and that command won't work
> > at all. I think you meant something like 'gzip -c9 - < /dev/hdb > back.gz' but
> > whatever you do, make sure you remount the partition read-only before trying that.
> > Also you really shouldn't be telling people to do things you clearly don't
> understand
> > yourself
>
> Wow no shit... Perhaps I know what I am doing and you are just being a pedantic
> jerkoff? You *CLEARLY* did not read my 'something like'. But instead want to make
> assumptions. I am not going to tell him how to do something. He is going to *HAVE* to
> learn to do it himself and by readings the man pages. I am merely giving pointers and
> being *NICE* about it (but if you want me to be a pissy jackoff I can totally
> oblige). FORGIVE my computer faux pas of mistyping zip vs gz and missing one of the
> command parameters for something I use once every couple of years. Maybe I
> accidentally mistook this board for stackoverflow like you did?

OK, let's go through everything wrong with that command you gave:

cat abuse - using cat in places where it isn't needed wastes resources and can lead to unexpected results
Using stdout redirect > when you mean pipe | which isn't obscure man page stuff, but basic shell usage common to Windows and *NIX
Expecting gzip to process stdin when it's well-known that it operates on files in-place, once again not obscure man page stuff but basic use of the tool (that's you you need to give '-' as an argument if you want it to compress stdin to stdout)
Forgetting that gzip won't compress to stdout without -c
Using .zip instead of .gz for a gzip file - that's not mistyping, mistyping would be something like .fz or .gx, that's a completely different combination of letters
Recommending to do something on a disk/partition device without appropriate warnings about precautions and risks, e.g. always remounting read-only before trying this stuff
Recommending use of a tool that does character I/O on a character device - you should really use a block I/O tool like dd to read a disk/partition device

If anyone's making assumptions it's you: you're assuming someone can look at a command that's completely wrong/dangerous/inefficient and somehow work out a sensible course of action from that. The fact is, people do try things they see recommended on the Internet. There's already enough bad advice out there without you contributing to it.

I'm not being pedantic, I'm just rather shocked at your cavalier attitude to advice on things where data integrity is important (backup) and wrong moves are liable to hose your data (working with disk/partition devices).