Free Imaging Tool for PCs

Well its been a busy few weeks...and I can see a few people think I have turned a bit geeky....Well a little bit yes and a little bit no. But then to live in IT you have to be geeky!(Jas surely you know what I mean!)

So the other day while I was working I kind of realised that there were some licensing issues to using Symantec Ghost which though its a great product is a tad bit expensive when you are trying to work on a shoe string budget in a organisation and got thinking about whether there would be any open source free applications that would work like ghost and create images of hard disks. My search on google led me to several, One of them was the fantastic yet not so free Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/) however it wasnt free and then my search led me to PartImage (http://www.partimage.org) which is a Linux Based application that would image Hard Disks. Now for a Windows Administrator the mere mention of the word Linux brings them out in a cold sweat! So before you all start sweating let me help you in setting this application up until the GUI interface which should be straight forward to anyone who has ever used Ghost.

First of all head to the following location(http://www.sysresccd.org) and download the System Rescue CD ISO and burn this using your CD Burning Application.

Now there are two ways to do this one is a Server/Client method which for a Windows Administrator might not make much sense and may just muddle you into disastrous consequences . The other more simpler method is the so called "map a drive" method which I found works quite well!

So here goes.

First boot into the System Rescue CD ISO that you burnt. There are some other very useful tools in this disc which you can explore later...At the boot: prompt just hit enter.

This will start kicking off the Hardware detection phase of Linux until it stops asking for the keyboard Character set.

Now since not everyone reading this is American and since I like flying the flag for British English I choose the country code that matches your keyboard in my case I will type in uk. Now hit return until you come to a prompt.

This is where I tell everyone to RTFM or in my case RTFS(S stands for Screen)

So lets get started first of all by setting up the network card.

You do this by typing the following command:

net-setup eth0

From here just follow the instructions for your network card as to whether it is a wired or a wireless network, whether you use DHCP or you want to static assign the IP address. The easiest option is to use DHCP as most networks have some form of this service.

Once you have made a selection you will then be returned back to the prompt.

Here type ifconfig which is the same as ipconfig /all in windows to check you have got a valid IP address for your network card.

The next thing you will need to do is create a mount point. Those of you familiar with Windows 2003/XP will be familiar with mount points but for those who aren't I will explain what they are briefly. To map a drive you use a drive letter using the net use command or the GUI the same way you can use a folder to map a network location.

Anyway to carry on first create a mount point. You can do use using the following command:
mkdir /mnt/image

Once you have created the mount point we will then map a share based on the server RHUBARB with the CIFS/SAMBA Share called image To do this we will now mount the share using a username and password for the share on the server RHUBARB:

mount -t smbfs -o username=imageusername,password=password //rhubarb/image /mnt/image

This will now mount the share to the mount point /mnt/image. If there are any problems with the above command try replacing the server name with the IP address or try checking the username and password. I have found using a local username and password on the server is better than using a domain account.

Once down you can now launch PartImage you do this by typing in partimage
This will load the GUI interface where you select the Partition you want to image, whether to restore or save an image etc.

You will then need to specify the filename of the image. You do this by typing in the path which you just mounted followed by the filename.

eg.: /mnt/image/Dell/gx210image

Now follow the defaults and follow the simple onscreen instructions. This will then kick off the process of creating the image. You may get a message that NTFS support is experimental. However I have found the support to be fine and to have not had any problems so far.

It is straight forward once you do it. Dont let Linux scare you! It is as simple as Symantec Ghost you just need some patience initially until you get the hang of it. But once you have used this tool you will seriously wonder you want to pay the money for a Symantec Ghost Licence!

Happy Imaging!