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My laptop's current setup dual boots into Windows XP and Linux Mint. The harddrive seems to be going bad, so I want to backup all the data from the Windows partition.
This laptop was a loyal servant for my 5 years in college for Computer Science, and as you can imagine, I have a lot of development files spread across all parts of the filesystem, so picking and choosing directories to copy to my thumbdrive will be very time consuming.
My ideal solution would be to create an image of the partition on an external harddrive, in a way so that I can later browse the files, should i ever need to find some old code files I had written.
It seems that my two options are to either create a disk image that I can later restore on another machine (via Clonezilla, DriveImage XML, TrueImage, or Ghost) , or create a virtual image where I can later mount in a virtual machine (via VirtualBox, VMWare, Virtual PC).
My question is: Can I create a partition image in a way that I can simply browse and run file searches on the file structure, without having to reload/restore the entire OS on another machine, load the entire image in a virtual machine, or extract the entire .iso file in a program like MagicISO, each time I want to access it? I just want to jump right in to view the files. I do not expect to write to the image - only read from.
Thanks for reading!!
UPDATE:
the path I have chosen thus far is to use the linux 'dd' tool (as recommended by Gilles). the reason is because I tried to install on my Windows partition Macrium Reflect and DriveImage XML or creating an image, and Disk2vhd for creating a virtual/mountable harddisk, but windows craps out on me when I do certain tasks related to explorer.exe and other processes. this is obviously due to the failing drive. the only downside is that I have to do this from a live Linux Mint disk, as the linux partition on the laptop won't even load because of corrupt/dirty disk sectors - a problem i once circumvented to obtain some files long ago, but don't have time to deal with now. which brings me to the task of having to monitor the two hour process each couple of minutes so the live cd screensaver doesn't come on and crap out the entire process... (oy vey!)
for anyone who wants to know, this is the command line process i put together:
create a mount location
sudo mkdir /mnt/usbdrive
find the location of my external usb harddrive (sdb1)
sudo fdisk -l
mount it as a drive
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbdrive
perform the backup command, disregarding any errors
sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/usbdrive/sda2.image bs=16M conv=noerror
in another terminal window, while 'dd' is working, we can trigger the process to spit out status updates every 2 minutes:
watch -n 120 sudo pkill -USR1 dd
Thanks for all the suggestions, and Happy Linux-ing! :)
would they also allow me to do file searches on specific in-file text? i would like to use my favorite search app AgentRansack or some functionality similar to it. AgentRansack is great for regular expression searches! – haferje – 2010-08-08T19:11:28.730
I just know that i've extracted folders from an image with Ghost Explorer.. I don't know if it has a search.. though if it did then I doubt it'd be as advanced as to support regex searches within files. You may have to extract the directories for that(then agent ransack). You could do both a clone image and copy all the folders over somewhere(zipped for tidyness)! powergrep is very good for regex searches, it can do PDFs too, though it's not freeware, and even then, I doubt it can search partition images from various proprietary programs. – barlop – 2010-08-08T19:50:20.583
btw, googling.. norton ghost explorer may be a bit old now. (no new version for a while). downloadable but not included in later versions of ghost so may be better alternatives. – barlop – 2010-08-08T19:52:34.107
You could make both a clone, and extract all files and folders. though that would need twice as much space. Or, if your regex searches are only on paths and filenames, then just do dir c:\ /b/s/a >c:\filelist.txt and then you have a file you can keep alongside the image and can do regex searches on to locate files/folders. And if you find one you want, then you can extract it. – barlop – 2010-08-11T12:28:02.070