Index of /andrejciho/Linux Windows/Reimaging your computer with Partimage

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Reimaging your computer with Partimage	2006-06-02 10:04	At your own risk, as always when tinkering with stuff

Partimage is an Open Source software for capturing an image of a drive and restoring it later. It works with ext2/ext3, reiserfs, fat16/32, jfs, xfs, ufs, hpfs, hfs and ntfs file systems. You can create/restore images of hard drives, usb memory keys, floppy disks etc. So without further introduction, here's how I prefer to use partimage:

I either boot from Knoppix live CD or into one of my Linux installs

Then I make sure that the partition I want to capture into an image file is NOT mounted and the partition where I want to save the image file IS mounted.

Then I open partimage by typing partimage

In the top of the screen that comes up…

• I choose the partition to save/restore
• In the "Image file to create/use" field I type in the path of the image file to create or use" e.g. /mnt/home/andrej/images/XPinstalled.gz
• Then I select the action that I want to take – save or restore – and hit Next or F5.

When saving an image, in the next screen…

• I select Gzip compression level
• Tell it to split the image files into files whose size is 2037MB
• Hit Next or F5

When saving an image, in the next screen I sometimes enter description of what I'm capturing. When I'm restoring an image I just confirm the image file I've selected.

When I'm in a command-line mood, to save a partition I type
partimage -z1 -d save /dev/sda2 /mnt/home/andrej/images/XPinstalled.gz
…and to restore it, I type
partimage restore /dev/sda2 /mnt/home/andrej/images/XPinstalled.gz