Kevin Krieser wrote:
>> I'll second the recommendation for clonezilla. It knows enough about
>> most filesystems (including windows ntfs) to only store the used
>> blocks
>> and it can use network storage over nfs, smb, or sshfs if you use the
>> bootable CD clonezilla-live version. If you do a lot of cloning, you
>> can also use the network-booting drbl version on a server that will
>> PXE
>> boot a client into clonezilla with the image storage directory already
>> NFS-mounted. There is an rpm for Centos to install this.
>
>
> The problem I had with clonezilla I had when I tried it once was I was
> attempting to clone a hard drive (windows) that had some bad sectors.
> Clonezilla didn't handle that well at all.
That doesn't sound like a clonezilla-specific problem. Have you found
some other tool that magically reads bad sector?
> Either in duplicating the
> drive from one drive to another, or when I tried to back it up to a
> file on another USB drive failed verify. Luckily, I had done a recent
> windows backup, so I went through the recovery DVD route on the new
> drive, removed programs I had previously removed from the factory
> install, then restored over itself. I spent a lot of effort trying to
> avoid that.
But - how often are you planning to clone bad drives? I'd try to use
something like ddrescue to try to recover first. In the normal case,
clonezilla does a good job.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com