BleepingComputer.com: PARTIMAGE - cannot restore image of Windows partition

I have a Dell Dimension 4500, which is 9 years old and on which I can boot either a Windows or Linux system.
I am trying to restore an image, which was created with the program ‘Partimage’, of the C-partition which holds the Windows system. With help from a tutorial on using Partimage, I successfully created an image and stored it on an external USB drive. Regrettably, the tutorial does not explain how to restore the image and I have not been able to do that. Here is a list of the steps that I have taken.

1. Downloaded the software for a (bootable) System Rescue Disk and burned it on to a DVD.

2. Rebooted from the DVD and was able run the Linux Terminal program.

3. TO CREATE THE IMAGE from the command line prompt, I entered the following commands:
mkdir /mnt/aa1
ntfs-3g /dev/sdb6 /mnt/aa1 –o force
I understand that these create a mount point, aa1 and mount the ntfs partition which had been given the Linux system name ‘sdb6’.

4. Ran program GParted to confirm that the partition had actually been mounted.

5. Ran the program ‘Partimage’, entered ‘startx’ to invoke the GUI and then followed the prompts
to create the image which I named
/mnt/aa1/bb1

6. The program ran successfully and after about 9 minutes created a file named bb1.000 which I was able to observe using the Windows Explorer .

7. TO RESTORE THE IMAGE, I repeated the steps 3-5 above but this time I followed the prompts to restore the image which I now referenced as
/mnt/aa1/bb1.000.
(Partimage had added the suffix .000 and could not recognize the file to be restored when that suffix was omitted.)

8. Partimage appeared to work. It asked me to confirm that I really wanted to overwrite the partition /dev/sda1 (which was the Linux name for my C-Partition) and it posted statistics showing the progress of the restoration, which took about 8 minutes. However, my C-Partition was unchanged. To indicate whether it had changed, I had saved an empty folder to my programs list which was not part of the original image and which should have disappeared when the image was replaced. It did not disappear.

9. I tried several variations, e.g. creating an image without compression and creating the image as a series of files of maximum size 2MB instead of a single large file. In each case, it appeared to work but there was no change to my C-partition.

I suspect that I am getting one of the Linux commands wrong, or omitting something.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards,
Thoughtful Skeptic

This post has been edited by hamluis: 26 December 2010 - 08:33 AM
Reason for edit: Moved from XP forum to All Other Applications ~ Hamluis.

You're making it very hard on yourself. if you use Windows, you should use native Windows imaging software such as Image For Windows. The program cam be found at www.terabyteunlimited.com under the link for it. It will run for a 30-day trial, but is only 38 dollars to buy. You get support and folks who know what they are talking about, and to restore images, you don't have to fart with Linux commands unless you want to, for you can opt to use the bart PE plugin. I like the program, and it works with all OS's with no additional licensing issues for Servers.

Hope this helps,
Chromebuster

There are any number of free imaging programs that work well with Windows. There is, IMO, no reason for anyone to pay or bother with a paid program...unless it's just a personal choice.

Louis

Any questions about a particular third-party program...really ought to first go to the support webpage for that program, IMO. Although forum members have diverse experiences, questions about how to use or proceed with third-party applications...really are out of the province of the Windows XP O/S, IMO.

This post has been edited by hamluis: 26 December 2010 - 08:32 AM

Thank you Hamluis and Chromebuster for your replies.

I had forgotten to mention that I keep this old computer only for learning and experiments and all my important stuff is elsewhere. So, I have already restored images using PING and the WD Acronis software that came with my Western Digital hard drive. So the object of the exercise was really just to learn how to use Partimage.

I have since succeeded in restoring with Partimage. I am not sure why it finally worked but I suspect that the reason is that I again built an image that used the default split size of 2.037 MB instead of creating one large file. So the image that I restored consisted of a series of image files, labeled bb1.000, bb1.001, bb1.002,. . .etc, each of size less than 2MB and this time it worked. Perhaps the software does not work properly with large files.

I was not able to restore with CloneZilla. My bootable disk refused to boot because it needs an X86-64 CPU but detected an i386.)

Anyway, thank you both once again for your replies.

Regards,

Thoughtful Skeptic

I have used partimage before in several different situations and have found it to be a very useful little piece of software. The one quirky thing is that it wont restore to a partition that is too small, or create one from scratch. You have to create a partition that is exactly the same or slightly bigger than the original and make sure it is NOT mounted, and format it FAT32 or NTFS. I have never used partimage from sysrescuecd but I have used it from Knoppix 5 and Ubuntu 8.04 live cd (have to download the partimage.deb though to install in the Ubuntu live. This should work... unless there is something else going on here I am missing, from reading your post it looks like this might be the answer.

Good luck!

mnemonic76

Thank you for your reply, Mnemonic76. I'll take a look at it, but the partition to which I was restoring was exact;y the same partition as that from which I had created the Partimage.

However, I did get Partimage to restore when I used the default file split size of 2.037 Mb.

Thanks again for your response.