Custom system restore DVD?

I am looking for a way to make a clone of a partition on a DVD where the client will actually be able to restore the partition himself without much hassle.

Any ideas ?

Rushino

Posted 2011-09-07T16:17:47.463

Reputation: 574

1I have an idea -- Tell us what OS you're talking about :-) – voretaq7 – 2011-09-07T16:38:41.130

4Clearly it's AIX - he wants to clone an LPAR (partition) and then do a system restore. – MikeyB – 2011-09-07T16:44:45.710

Windows 7, XP, etc.. – None – 2011-09-07T18:09:29.950

1@Rushino in that case you can safely ignore MikeyB and voretaq7's responses, unless you want to do this from a Linux live CD. =) – Wesley – 2011-09-07T18:41:09.557

1@WesleyDavid: Huh? Linux? Neither of us were talking about Linux. – MikeyB – 2011-09-07T18:45:16.857

@MikeyB Technicalities. Pish posh. =P – Wesley – 2011-09-07T18:46:10.093

Windows Backup + Windows Installation DVD will do this. – Chris S – 2011-09-07T18:49:44.147

@Rushino - We have tags for those operating systems -- added 'em for you. Also WesleyDavid's answer is probably the best fit for your situation :)) – voretaq7 – 2011-09-07T18:51:13.810

Answers

I've used System Rescue CD to make a bootable image of my machine. There are couple limitations I don't like, such as you can't restore the image onto a smaller hard drive, even if your image only has a small amount of data, and also related, if you restore onto a larger drive, you will have a partition which is the same size as the partition you backed up. Other than that, it works great. The backup can be compressed quite small, and can be stored on a USB stick or USB hard disk for later use.

Kibbee

Posted 2011-09-07T16:17:47.463

Reputation: 1 372

You'll want to consider two resources:

The Microsoft OPK Deployment Kit. Check out the document titled "Creating a Hard Disk Recovery Solution for Windows 7"
Third party tools such as one by a company called FarStone. I won't link to it directly since I haven't tested it myself and I'm slightly skeptical of the website.

There aren't a ton of third party tools out there to do this, and there's probably a good reason for that. I would strongly suggest looking at the OEM Preinstallation Kit and using that as a base for making your recovery partition.

Wesley

Posted 2011-09-07T16:17:47.463

Reputation: 4 359

This is actually a brilliantly simple process.

The mksysb command creates an installable system image from a partition and the mkdvd command can be used to write this image out as a bootable DVD.

With this DVD, you can restore the system to the point at which the mksysb snapshot was taken.

MikeyB

Posted 2011-09-07T16:17:47.463

Reputation: 1 232

You really can't do wrong with dump(8) and restore(8). On most modern systems you can even send the output directly to a DVD device.

If you need something a little more bare-metal there's always dd(1), but that's nowhere near as user-friendly...

voretaq7

Posted 2011-09-07T16:17:47.463

Reputation: 2 051