Ghosting NTFS/Windows using Knoxppix

I have a USB 1 Gig stick that is on my key ring.
Its really handy, as I have a complete copy of Knoxppix.
Knoxpix is a Linux Distribution designed to boot and run
from CDROM or DVD. It can also run from a handy USB stick.
With the right options it can also in "RAM", which is handly if you want to
run a few parallel operations, and only need one usb stick.

While you can use clonezilla, if you want something more packaged,
but in a shop that is windows centric, ghosting to a windows server
may make more sense.

Boot your usb stick, then at the bash shell, mount your server:

mount -t cifs //server-name/share-name /mnt/cifs -o username=shareuser,password=sharepassword,domain=nixcraft

On the share, I usually will the have my ntfscloning scripts

On a dell machine, there is really only one partition that has "data",

So to the "dobackup" script is very trival.
This takes the OS partition, in most of the environments I was working in this
would have been /dev/sda2 and uses ntfsclone, which takes only the in-use
sectors, compresses them, and put them in a file on the server.

dobackup script

echo backup $1 to $2
mkdir $2
ntfsclone -s -o - /dev/$1 | gzip > $2/$1.ntfsclone.gzip


The reverse, to restore is:

dorestore script

echo restore $1 to $2
cd $1
cat $2.ntfsclone.gzip | gunzip - | ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/$2 -


The only other madatory item is the partition table:

doptablebackup script

echo partion backup $1 to $2
sfdisk -d /dev/$1 > $2/ptable.doc
dd if=/dev/$1 bs=512 count=1 of=$2/ptable.sector


doptablerestore script

echo partion restore $1 to $2
dd of=/dev/$2 bs=512 count=1 if=$1/ptable.sector