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[igoret]

Ping 2.0 RC6 Doesn't seems to work with W2k3 + RAID

I did a full disk image on a Dell PowerEdge 840 with a SAS 5/Ir controller attached to 2 SAS Disks. The RAID functionalily is disable, I only use the first disk.

The imaging went fine. There is a small FAT16 partition 6MB for the Dell utilities and a regular NTFS partition: 20GB.

The restore seems to take a very long time: about 1 1/2 hours for a 20GB image (Image on Network or USB 2.0 removable drive takes about the same time).
The image restore go to the end: all bytes are restored, by the percentage stay at 99%, I need to reboot to get out of this.

After this the drive seems to be corrupted: cannot reboot in w2k3. I can mount the NTFS on Linux and see the files, but running some of NTFS utilities prompt that the partition is druty and for running CHKDSK under w2k3.

Any insights?
Thanks.

[Natan]

Yes, sure. This is due to the infamous Dell utility partition. Presently, PING fails because of it, and the best choice is probably to remove it (partition magic (r) or any similar tool) before making an image.

A workaround is on its way (RC8).

Regards
Natan

[igoret]

Is there a way I could salvage my RC6 image? At least for the NTFS partition. There a bunch of stuff on it, I would hate to reinstall. If not now any hope with RC8?

[Curtis8]

We are working on a fix, watch for the RC8 release. Also you can delete (or move to another folder) the file from the image that houses the Dell partition then you should be able to restore from that. Just a thought, have not tried it. Do you want to be my guinea pig?

[igoret]

The original image contains the following files:

08/13/2007 08:25 AM 384 bios
08/13/2007 08:25 AM 512 sda
08/13/2007 08:25 AM 3,712,920 sda1.000
08/13/2007 08:25 AM 10,240 sda1.first_sectors
08/13/2007 08:31 AM 660,640,709 sda2.000
08/13/2007 08:36 AM 660,627,608 sda2.001
08/13/2007 08:41 AM 660,662,863 sda2.002
08/13/2007 08:47 AM 660,628,390 sda2.003
08/13/2007 08:52 AM 660,623,888 sda2.004
08/13/2007 08:59 AM 660,628,644 sda2.005
08/13/2007 09:04 AM 660,632,410 sda2.006
08/13/2007 09:09 AM 660,630,473 sda2.007
08/13/2007 09:35 AM 512,268,623 sda2.008
08/13/2007 08:26 AM 10,240 sda2.first_sectors

I removed bios, sda1.000 and sda1.first_sectors.
I tried to restore with RC7 (note that it's a RC6 image), still can't reboot after restore. Note: With RC7 I don't seems to get stuck at 99% anymore but exit to the shell.

I have a few questions:
1) Can I try something else?
2) Would I be able to restore this RC6 image with RC8?
3) If so, what's the estimated timeframe for RC8?

Very appreciated.
Igoret.

[Curtis8]

Try renaming the sda2 files to sda1. Add a sda.part file to create the new dir structure. Be sure to backup all image files before deletion you don't want to lose something that maybe important. The version of PartImage has not changed for our PING 2.00 RCs only the ping script has been updated, so the image will work with any of our versions (to my knowledge)

[chunkyfine]

Hi there,

I downloaded the latest image and I created a PXE boot machine and network server as per the documentation (all good).

I created a total disk backup of one of my machines (worked like a charm)

Then I took another machine same hardware (exactly same) and tried to restore onto this machine.

This did not work.

Not sure why - I was backing up a Linux sata disk found at /dev/sda . It seems like Lilo is not being copied correctly.

So I formatted the MBR on the destination disk but this made no difference at all.

Any ideas - it hits Lilo and comes out like this
L 9999999999.. etc etc etc etc etc..

Look forward to your comments and help hopefully

[siebrand]

Some feedback. PING 2.01 used on a Dell Inspiron 9300 with an 80GB drive. About 55GB was used and I wanted to stick in another disk. Backup medium was a USB connected 250GB drive.

It took about 8 hours to create the backup and another 8 hours to restore on the new hard drive. Compression used was gzip. Average backup/restore speed was about 125MB/min.

Even though functionality wise things worked flawlessly, I will most probably not consider using this tool again because it does not appear to use the I/O paths available to the max. I would have expected read/write of at least 5MB/s. This way things just take too much time.

Still: thank you for making this tool available and I do hope you are able to make it faster.

[skylive]

Hi all,

Once again, thank you for making this tool available. So much easier to use than Partimage itself. I would like to give 3 suggestions for the improvement of PING:

1. Could the HOW-TO Section on setting up a PXE Server without a Domain Controller using the TFTPD method be clearer? I messed around with it for an hour and still could not get it working. Some really clear and detailed instructions on how to set up DHCP and everything else would really be appreciated.

2. Again the GUI isn't very I would say responsive and initiative. Hopefully it can be better.

3. Multicast if possible ( I know there's Clonezilla, but I really love PING), and that's to complement the future run'N'forget system mentioned for CD / DVDs.

I know its bad of me to just shoot off everything here and hope someone could do something about it, but I really can't do much to help . Love all you guys making this program!

With my warmest regards,
David

[mmuras]

Hey Folks:

I know I have not posted in a while...but I have also been using PING 2.01 successfully with a variety of NTFS PCs...and I love the product.

Anyway...I was wondering if we could get an auto partition / format feature added (that doesn't break the PartImage Shell)...

Hopefully that can be done or someone already has a solution...

Thanks,

-mmuras

[ken]

Some feedback. PING 2.01 used on a Dell Inspiron 9300 with an 80GB drive. About 55GB was used and I wanted to stick in another disk. Backup medium was a USB connected 250GB drive.

It took about 8 hours to create the backup and another 8 hours to restore on the new hard drive. Compression used was gzip. Average backup/restore speed was about 125MB/min.

Even though functionality wise things worked flawlessly, I will most probably not consider using this tool again because it does not appear to use the I/O paths available to the max. I would have expected read/write of at least 5MB/s. This way things just take too much time.

Still: thank you for making this tool available and I do hope you are able to make it faster.

I think most of the time is spent compressing with Gzip. Would it be possible to add Lzo and/or No Compression options to the Gzip and Bz2 selection now used?

Storage space is inexpensive now and these options should be faster.

[Curtis8]

The compression is built into PartImage and not PING. You would have to talk to them to have something like that added. There are other features that we would like to chage in PartImage as well.

[ken]

Doesn't the -z0 option give no compression in PartImage?

You are right about Lzo compression, it's only in the unstable versions which have been inactive for years.

ken

[Natan]

It's right, there's a -z0 option. I'm not convinced about the speed gain, because CPUs go fast and byte-writing is quite slow, but this is a valid TODO item.

Regards
Natan

[fredo]

Hello there,

I'm currently testing PING 2.01.8 (will try the latest version)

I'm glad I found such a great tool, at last a REAL alternative to commercial software. Thank you guys!

No DHCP here so I have to enter IP manually

I'm busy cloning disks via smb share.

Backuping the master hard disk worked great (one sata disk, 2 ntfs 80gb partitions sda1 and sda5)

Slight bug encountered with restore : I get the message

"the second argument [/dev/sda5] must be a valid device (ex: /dev/hda1)"

if a do a "fdisk /dev/sda", I see the second partition (sda5) has been created, but has no label (should be "DATA")

If I restart the whole restore process, no error encountered anymore, disk is cloned ok.

Maybe it would be great if we could choose during the restore process, which partition(s) to restore, or the whole disk?

EDIT: just tested using the PING 2.01.9
same problem, seems to be related to ntfsresize?