I have a couple of machines which run FreeBSD.
Both have a little 4GB WinXP partition, which was installed for admin and to make sure everything works.
One can boot into either OS.
I need to be able to make an "image" backup of the whole HD (though really I am after a backup of the boot stuff and the FreeBSD stuff; the winXP bit I can rebuild if I have to) to a network drive (ethernet), from either OS (though I would prefer it from within Windows because then I am 100% sure there are no open files in BSD which are inaccessible and are missing from the backup).
I can achieve this now using Trueimage, from Windows, which is a great tool which I have used all over the place, but TI doesn't restore the unix MBR (even if you explicitly select the MBR for restoration) so while the restored data "seems all there" it just boots into Windows.....
TI has other problems like this; for example if you use it to backup a Thinkpad laptop which has a special 4GB IBM utilities partition, there is no way to restore that partition. If you have to replace the HD, you lose that feature (no big deal really).
So... is there a windozeXP based imaging prog which just does the whole damn lot, hopefully compressing empty sectors that are full of 0xFFs etc (the HD is a 256GB SSD which is mostly empty space and I would prefer to not end up with a 256GB image
) and which can restore it easily, again from within Windoze?
There is a catch
The
server has motherboard is a brand new
Gigabyte one whose ethernet controller is not recognised by most software. Even the latest Trueimage 2012 does not recognise it. WinXP doesn't either - unless you install the Gigabyte drivers that come on the CD.
This means that to restore using Trueimage I have to first copy the archive to a separate partition on the local HD, which is stupid, even if TI did the MBR correctly.
This is why I am after an imaging prog which restores the image while running inside a running copy of Windows.
However this may mean that it cannot overwrite the Windows partition, which is fine...
Or one which supports the "Atheros GbE LAN chip" which this motherboard has...