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Date:      Sun, 24 Feb 2002 12:45:38 -0500
From:      Chip Morton <tech_info@threespace.com>
To:        FreeBSD Chat <chat@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Drive/Partition Copying Utilities
Message-ID:  <4.3.2.7.2.20020224124537.018da7d0@threespace.com>

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At 11:43 PM 2/23/2002, Brad Knowles wrote:
>         I know that Ghost is good for doing a bit-for-bit disk copy for 
> Microsoft OSes, but does it really properly grok Linux and FreeBSD 
> filesystems?  How does it manage to grow a Linux or FreeBSD 
> filesystem?  Heck, for that matter, how does it manage to grow a 
> Microsoft filesystem?

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.

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.

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.

Thanks all,
Chip Morton


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