Make your own "System Restore" DVD

Last week I bought a Dell Studio Hybrid on eBay. As a second-hand machine, it has WinXP pre-installed but there are no install disks and the "Dell System Restore" partition has been wiped out. My intention is to image the drive in the "manufacturer condition" before messing with it.

This task is often done with Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. I wanted to find out what could be done with SystemRescueCD. SystemRescueCD is a live Linux distro containing utilities to backup, restore, image, re-partition your hard drive.

WARNING: If you are not familiar with Linux/Unix and hard disk partitions, don't try this on a machine that runs anything useful. It is very easy to render a WindowsXP/Vista system unbootable with the slightest modification. If you use Linux, if you move or modify your /boot partition, you will have to re-install Grub or Lilo.

Summary of operations

1. Download SystemRescueCD and burn .iso and burn it on CD or install on a USB key


2. List the device names of the partition(s) to be backed up and of the partition used to store the images. Usually, you would want to use an external drive to store the images.


3. Reboot in the Live CD environment. Check the partitions to back-up, mount the storage partition, use partimage.


4. Reboot back to your usual OS. Burn the .iso image of SystemRescueCD to a multisession DVD. Then append the backup files to another directory on the DVD. Or, extract the iso image to your hard drive, add data folders and create a new bootable CD/DVD as you would with isolinux


5. Check your backup! Reboot with the newly made DVD and run partimage in simulation mode.
   

SystemRescueCD Tips

At the boot prompt, you can hit enter and wait for the OS to load. I found that the default kernel works on all my machines, and that when the system didn't boot it was because of read errors from the CD drive. Once SystemRescueCD has loaded, you want to bring up the graphic environment (Xfce Desktop) by typing wizard. This will create an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. If you quit Xfce, you can go back to it by typing startx. You can bring up the network by typing dhcpd, assuming that you are on a network with a DHCP server.

When it comes to customizing SystemRescueCD, the documentation assumes that you will do this from the LiveCD environment. This is probably the best route to make significant changes, adding software or modules. However, if you just want to add a few files to the CD image, you can do this by following the instructions for building a bootable disk with isolinux. SystemRescueCD is based on Gentoo and is using a squashfs filesystem.

Using partimage

Partimage expects you to mount the partition you are going to use to save the image files, but to have your source partition(s) unmounted. You can mount partitions on /mnt/backup /mnt/custom or /mnt/windows, or create your own mount point in /mnt

Here is a screenshot of partimage backing up a partition. I use the graphic environment to have more than one terminal at a time and check the documentation with Firefox.

Using GParted

GParted is a graphic tool to move/resize partitions, similar to Acronis Disk Director. Support for NTFS filesystems is experimental. Back-up your data if you intend to use it with NTFS. Follow the special instructions for NTFS in the GParted manual. I used GParted on clean, defragmented NTFS system partition on a SATA drive, and got a corrupt filesystem that couldn't be recovered with chkdsk. I had to recover it with partimage.