Feedback

[ampster]

Since you are so accomodating about suggestions
here is another one:
add a splash screen capability, it might be optional
as something we can add if we rebuild our own isos.
There is a fun splash screen @ LFS:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/ar ... -by-ct.jpg
There is excellent material at
http://www.bootsplash.org

I find it useful to have a splash screen since I give an
(adjusted) PING CD to people who only know how to turn
on a PC and put a CD in the drive
They put in the CD, start the PC and walk away.

The application is at a workshop, in which you want
to reinstall a base OS+apps at the beginning of each workshop
and make sure the work of the previous participants is deleted.

I dont want to do this via PXE since I want the managers of the workshop
to take care of the OS re-installation whenever they want.

Anthony

[ampster]

Crulie
For the Windows 2003 server, you are not really giving any info
that anyone can comment on.
How many partitions do you have?
Can you give the output of sfdisk -l /dev/hda?
What have you done in shell mode to figure out what is going on?
Have you tried partimage on its own and checked what it is doing?

Anthony

[Curtis8]

I like the splash screen. Quite funny.

[crulie]

Ampster,

You're right, I'm low on info..

At the moment I don't have the opportunity or time to do more tests with my server machine. But I guess the question I tried to ask is if anyone else have had similar problems with Windows 2003 server.

Perhaps the OS is using a different version of NTFS that's not enough reverse engineered yet. As for the my partition scheme, it's a single partition size: approx 33 GB. The machine has got a hardware raidsystem containging 4 discs. A raid 5 system with one spare disc. The server is a DELL PowerEdge 1950.

Since I'm running Linux on the same hardware and PING is working great with that, I doubt that it would be the raid-system casuing my problems.

Regards,
Daniel

[Zian]

System Setup:
Dell E1505
NTFS
80 GB 7200 RPM
Windows XP Media Center Edition

Backing up to:
Seagate FreeAgent Pro via USB
SimpleTech via USB

The process went quite smoothly until the screen to select the backup destination. I used the arrow keys to highlight the Seagate drive and then selected OK. Then, PING threw a pile of command-line messages which essentially said to try again. I did. PING complained again. Ad infinitum for about 10 times. Then, I tried to Cancel by highlighting Cancel and pressing Enter. Nothing happened. I was trapped in PING. I had to hold down the power button to escape.

Eventually, I tried pressing the spacebar after highlighting the drive and things continued from there.

I then selected the slower form of compression because I thought my Core 2 Duo would be able to easily handle it. When I saw the 6+ hours time, I force shut down and ran PING again, this time using ZIP compression. The process still took many hours but at that point, I had given up on obtaining a speedy copy of my hard drive.

From reading forum posts, it appears that PING does not work well with Dell hard drives, especially when they have more than 1 partition. Consequently, I will not use PING until it supports my setup better.

Summary of Things to Improve On:
User interface
---Don't use "OK" and "Cancel" for what is essentially a wizard application. Things like "Next" and "Back" would be better.
---Don't let me go past a screen without selecting anything
---The GUI is very nice already. Don't dump command line stuff at me, especially for critical error messages.
---Default to going into PING and let me go to the shell from there. Otherwise, I might not notice the message instructing me on the proper incantations to get into PING's GUI.

Compression Algorithms
---If the time difference isn't much, then pick 1 for me.

I look forward to using new verion(s) of PING.

[Natan]

Hi Zian,
thanks for your feedback. The GUI can surely be improved, and will be, one way or another (we use a static shell command called 'dialog', and won't use a X11 interface (aka windows) because of the memory it would take; but we'll find an alternative).

To my mind, PING should not be used as a backup tool, but rather as a tool dedicated to the restoration of a working OS. I mean : your data should be backuped to an external hdd, as you did, from Windows itself (zip the folder). Only the OS (windows, program files, documents and folders but without the MP3 and MPEGs ) should be PINGed.

Data backup should be updated often ; system backup should be stored from times to times.

Regards
Natan

[Zian]

Sounds good.

I used PING because I thought I'd have to roll back the entire hard drive and so I used it to image the entire drive (OS, data, and all) before fiddling with the Windows install.

I store everything on 1 drive so I don't really have an easy way to seperate out the OS from the data. If PING works for Dell drives in the future, I'll probably do monthly/weekly incremental backups through Windows and a biannual PING image.

[Natan]

Hi Zian,
if i were you, i'd run a tool sy=uch as partition magic, and
- suppress the dell service partition (problematic to ping);
- split the main partition.

System could reside in a 20 go-partition, for example.

regards
natan

[Zian]

If you don't mind a minor thread-jack, then I'll elaborate on my situation a little more:
I use my laptop outside/off the plug a lot so when I got a new hard drive, I tried to set up the diagnostic/recovery partition. I had problems so now I just have a tiny FAT partition in front of a giant partition with everything else.

Would PING work with this?

And for various reasons, I don't really like working on systems with the data on a seperate partition.

[Natan]

If you don't mind a minor thread-jack, then I'll elaborate on my situation a little more:
I use my laptop outside/off the plug a lot so when I got a new hard drive, I tried to set up the diagnostic/recovery partition. I had problems so now I just have a tiny FAT partition in front of a giant partition with everything else.

Would PING work with this?

Hi Zian,

Sorry for noting the presence of your post so lately. Holidays...

Users have reported failure in this case, and I still don't know why. We'll really have to find a solution (grrr). Would you be available for a little testing with specific rc.ping files ?

Regards
Natan

[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.