[ILUG] copying windows filesystems under linux

[Cian Brennan]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 09:28:14PM +0100, Lisa Muir wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 3:21 PM, Kingsley G. Morse Jr. <change at nas.com> wrote:
> > I had similar problems for years and seem to have
> > found a solution.
> >
> > I recently switched to running Windows under qemu,
> > which lets Windows access just one linux file
> > called a "disk image".
> >
> > Disk images encapsulate Windows file system
> > attributes, can be backed up with normal linux
> > tools, and mounted for direct linux access if
> > necessary.
> 
> Nice... except in todays example where I copied an ntfs file system
> from one disk to another, it was because disk a was dying badly, read
> errors, and I was doing recovery. I dont like messing with windows, so
> I'll pull the filesystem and deploy it on a new disk, and tell the
> user "its exactly as you had it, don't blame me if something aint
> working". In the odd case, you can't recover portions of the system,
> and I'll go so far as to install windows on a new disk, and overlay
> what i can recover from the dying disk.
> 
> For straight backup purposes, DD'ing partitions / drives is a good way
> out, but a killer for time nowadays when you're dealing with users who
> have maybe 10G of data on a 500G drive, and you gotta dd read the
> whole 500G... pipe it through gzip and endup with a nice 5G compressed
> dd file.
> 
> For recovery from dying disks, if you've ever tried to do it using
> windows tools they'll hit some bloody temporary internet file which
> has a filename too long, and the whole process stops, doing it with
> linux is sweet, just come back and look at the list of errors, and
> deal with them one by one.
> 
> I used to use cp -r and copy out entire directory structures, then
> people started bitchin about how on recovered systems life it seems
> began at the date and time of my recovery, ie, all the timestamps were
cp -a will preserve time stamps.

Never tried it on NTFS I'm afraid though.
> messed up. Thats when I switched to find and cpio -pdm and now I'm
> just left with certain little hassles around hidden files. No biggie
> really, I'm just looking to perfect what I do before I get into the
> vista world where system binaries have attributes which are tied to
> the disk they were installed on, which makes so many recovery tricks
> redudant, you can't even overinstall vista on an existing vista
> installation because of this. Getting linux tools which can mess with
> windows file attributes will be the only way forward for windows
> admins!!
> 
> Lisa.
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