Ittichote Chuckpaiwong

My Fujitsu S6120D notebook shipped with PowerQuest's Drive Image SE program, which allowed my computer to be restored the original factory image any time I want. But after I repartitioned my hard disk to install Linux, the program doesn't work any more. I still like the idea of keeping hard disk image, and being able to restore it anytime when there is a problem. I searched and found Partimage, a Linux utility which saves hard disk partitions (including Window's NTFS filesystems) to an image file. Partimage can be used from an installed Linux partition or from Live CD such as SystemRescueCD.

To save image of the partition

First, let's check the name of the partition to be saved (if we don't know it yet):

$ sudo fdisk -l

The partition to be saved must not be mounted. To check whether the device is mounted, use command:

$ mount

If the device is mounted, you need to unmount by using command (In this case, /dev/hda1 is the partition that I want to save)

sudo umount /dev/hda1

To create image using the following command lines:

$ sudo partimage -z1 -od save /dev/hda1 /home/ittichote/win_image-2007-10-16.partimg.gz

Follow the user interface to complete the job.

To burn image file to DVD disc

In my case, I used DVD+R to store the image files. Here are the following commnad lines I used:

$ sudo growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -R -J win_image-2007-10-16.partimg.gz.00*

Note that it is important to prefix the command with sudo. Without that the image file will not be able to be read, and it will make the DVD useless (throw it out or make another coaster).

To restore the partition image

Again the partition to be restored must not be mounted. You must locate the image file, then use the command:

$ sudo partimage restore /dev/hda1 /home/ittichote/win_image-2007-10-16.partimg.gz.000