Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 10:33:29 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Chip Morton <tech_info@threespace.com> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Drive/Partition Copying Utilities Message-ID: <3C7931F9.7F08969A@mindspring.com> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20020224124537.018da7d0@threespace.com>
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Chip Morton wrote: > I know that PowerQuest PartitionMagic has had the ability to "grow" and > "shrink" Microsoft filesystems for a while now. The growing process is > actually fast, since it seems to just move the partition boundary and clean > out the newly created space. The shrinking requires a defrag, so it take > much longer. This has actually worked pretty well on FAT/FAT32 drives for > me, but the one time I tried it on an NTFS drive, it screwed up the NTLDR > file, and it's really a PITA to get that thing back in place. It's a bear to use to get dual-boot working with BootMagic with NTFS, though it's certainly possible to do (I posted on this in the past), but Partition Magic specifically warns you if you try to make an NTFS partition that's bootable span the 4G front of the disk. Windows XP NTFS appears to have resolved this problem, at least to the normal 8G, if not better. Are you sure you didn't just shoot yourself in the foot by ignoring the warning? > For Linux and BSD filesystems, PartitionMagic will just tell you that the > partitions are there and then (wisely) not allow you to do anything with > them except format/delete them. Ah. You are running 6.x, where NTFS support came in, but there was no warning. 7.x warns you, and 7.x is capable of moving EXT2 partitions around. I wrote and offered to write the FFS code for whatever operations they wanted to be able to do, and I also told them about some human factors issues. They were happy to hear about the human factors stuff (got an email back from a V.P. thanking me), but you could hear the crickets on the response to the FFS offer. > When this problem came up, PowerQuest DriveCopy was the first thing that > popped into my head, but I have no experience with it. I hadn't even > considered Norton Ghost; I was unaware that it could resize partitions or > do anything more than reimage to a drive of exactly the same size. I'll > have to give it a look. Ghost will install an image to different sized drives. It's useful that way. I expect DriveCopy will do the same, given the PartitionMagic legacy from PowerQuest, but I haven't used it, so I can't say for sure. Ghost as a Windows XP recovery tool really sucks. You really want it to spam Windows XP onto a partition of indeterminate size, rather than spamming the disk, or give you the option, but it spams the disk. Beware when using "Windows XP recovery CDROMs" lest you blow away your FreeBSD, as well (I had to do a reimage of a dual boot system, but I knew that the recovery disks had major suckage, so I planned ahead with a backup). I expect that if DriveCopy has the different sizing feature, it will have the partition feature, too, since the PowerQuest people know how to redo an NTFS correctly (it's pretty trivial to support NTFS writes, if your FS abstraction API is able to support cancelling of transactions). That would make it a better choice for recovery CDROM mastering, in my book. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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