When I copy drives for Windows I usually use Norton Ghost or Casper XP. I have used these for many years and I could not do my job with out them. When I started playing around with Ubuntu I was wondering how I could do the same. I searched around the Internet and found that the best program to do this is Acronis True Image 11 Home.
My setup on my system is I have 2 hard drives. One has Windows XP installed on it and the other drive has Ubuntu 7.1. I use my BIOS utility that allows to decide which drive to boot from. This setup eliminates the need for boot managers. My 80gig Ubuntu drive was starting to get full. (Virtual Box with several clients can really eat up the drive). So this is what I did:
First I booted into my XP. Installed Acronis True Image software (will only run under Windows XP,2000 or Vista.) Then I shutdown my PC. Attached the new bigger drive to copy my Ubuntu drive to. Rebooted back into XP and ran the Acronis software. I selected the clone option and selected my Ubuntu drive as my source. Made sure I did not select delete source after cloning. Then select my new drive as the destination and specified to use the entire drive. After about an hour later it copied the drive. I then shutdown and detached my smaller Ubuntu drive and put my newer Ubuntu in place and tried to boot the new Ubuntu. It did not boot properly so then I decided to check the new drive. To do this I rebooted my PC with my Ubuntu DVD disk. I then went into the partition editor. Selected the Ubuntu Drive and selected check drive. After this is said the drive was completed. I shutdown the PC, took out the Ubuntu DVD, selected my new Ubuntu drive and ta-da it booted fine.
Hi
I read your post. There is an free software alternative to take the image of a partition like Norton GHost. You can find it on knoppix 5.1 livecd or even in Ubuntu. But it is not wise to take the image of a mounted partition.
What is the purpose of taking the image of Ubuntu partition. You will never reinstall Ubuntu even if the system crashes. Since Ubuntu configurations are based on configuration file you can solve a problem in Ubuntu even without booting into it. You can use a live cd for solving the problem. I am using Debian GNU/linux. when started using it I too reinstalled the OS when some error occurred. But now I am using Debian very wisely and I am satisfied with it.
You are welcome to the free software world.
Thank you.
I am not taking an image I am copying my small drive to a larger drive. The drive that Ubuntu is on was getting full. Its not for backup purpose but for convenience. Rather than reinstalling Ubuntu on the bigger drive and then reinstalling all the updates and software again I just wanted to “ghost” the drive.
Steve