New twist on drive copy - Win - Win using Linux to stage?

[The Hoelschers]

*** EUREKA!  IT IS DONE!  ***
Read on after a few comments....

Brian Kelsay wrote:

> I have used Norton Ghost extensively and it does an exact copy.   

Yeah, but - I am trying to not go "commercial" as this is a one-time
thing for me personally.
 
> The key in an enterprise situation is buying a bunch of exact duplicate
> PCs (building them yourself is better) all with at least the same video
> card, NIC (the most important) and motherboard chipset.   You can
> contact me for further details, but let me just say that if I work
> someplace that wants me to build lots of PCs or servers and they won't
> buy Ghost or some equivalent then I'm outta there.

I agree, if it were an enterprise or business.  However, the reason I
got into Linux in the first place is I can't afford the continuous
gyrations of expensive software driven by OS "upgrades" that I can't
afford, forcing me to faster systems, again that I can't afford.

Of course, once I got into Linux a little, i realized it could do
anything the other guys can do, and do it better.  It just takes a
little help from your friends sometimes.

*** EUREKA!  IT IS DONE!  ***

Thanks to some helpful discussion here, I went to www.partimage.org. 
While it looked good, it does not yet support changing partition sizes. 
**HOWEVER** on that page, it referred me to GNU Parted (partition
editor).  A little read through their FAQ, and in chapter 8, I found
exactly what I wanted to do (plus a little more).

A couple of trial-n-errors (hey - who cares? I had a blank drive to
start with....) and a few more comments from the list, and my daughter
now has a fully functioning 3.0 Gig Win98 (with her college's Novell
in-tact) hard drive!  WoooHooo!  Now I just have to send it up to her,
and have her plug it in.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to detail how I did it, but it
seems this might not be a very common problem, and I think I've gone too
long already...

Again, thanks to all who participated/helped in the discussion....

Chris.
 

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