moving filesystems- Unix good, Windows bad

[Jaz]

Hi all, I hope someone can suggest a method of moving filesystems on
Windows. This is just silly, the lack of tools and methods...

I've tried ghost, cygwin (tar piped to cd;tar), but can't figure out
how to get a large filesystem moved without destroying it. (By
"destroyed" I mean, timeststamps changed, shortcuts replaced by
targets, long filenames truncated, etc.)

In the case of Ghost -- booting from floppy AND installing Ghost
Enterprise (which then reboots into dos) -- I get 200MB per minute...
PER MINUTE!!! On a 160MByte/second disk interface!!! This between two
Maxtor Atlas 10K drives which should have a throughput of nearly
90MByte per second (at best). I'm therefore getting 200/(90*60)= 3.7%
of threoritical maximum data transfer. Average!

Ummm, this simply doesn't happen with Unix systems. Why doesn't M$
build in tools for managing disk subsystems?! I searched for an
entire day for tools to do this, but with no luck whatsoever.

<rant>

I love Sun equipment. I've used Sun from SunOS 3.x, and have
maintained filesystems well over a TB. If I need to a filesystem to a
larger disk or to raid, I just boot into single user, mount up a new
device, and: tar cf - . | (cd newpath; tar xfBp -)
This preserves long paths and symlinks, and i can compare the count of
each file type using find just to make sure nothing is missing.

But Windows?! What a joke! Why is it that all the companies I've
worked for over the past two years use Windows as file servers (or any
server for that matter). Okay, the answer is clear: Exchange,
Outlook, Project, etc., and the executive mentality is that they can
have their cake and eat it too, if they throw a ton of money at the
security and maintenance problems.

But for us techies who maintain the hardware... We have to deal with
crap support from Dell (flame on) -- tho I give good marks to HP and
IBM -- and a disgusting mire of OS problem from Microsoft.

</rant>

Phew! Feels good to get that off my chest.
So, any suggestions, ideas, or expressions of pity?

Thanks in advance,
JAZ
(Please excuse the 'burp' when replying)

 

[Dan DeStefano]

then why use windows if it sucks so bad.

there are many tools to manage/copy/move/etc files in windows. first things
first, are you using ntfs? because there are a lot of limitations with the
fat/fat32 file systems including partition size.
have you tried using xcopy? robocopy?

and about using ghost - any program like this will have overhead -
compression/encoding/etc.. plus, all drive throughput ratings are
theoretical, you will never be able to achieve the maximum rated throughput
of a disk, no matter what os you use. then there is the discrepancy between
the way hdd manufacturers measure capacity vs. the way software does. hdd
manufacturers use decimal, while software uses binary. so, to a hdd
manufacturer, 1kb=1000 bytes, while to software, 1kb=1024 bytes.

Dan

 

[Yor Suiris]

YES, YES, YES,
I have always had trouble with MS System Partitions filling up and then no
good/easy method to move them to another disk. From NT 3.51 to my current
2K servers I always created a partition that was at least twice the
recommended size and then put as much as possible on other drives. But!
after time (a year or two) the system drive is chewed up and I need a larger
one.
With NT 4 I would Mirror the old drive with another old drive then break the
mirror and copy the copy to a fresh hard drive, set it active and reboot.
Worked OK.
But since Win2K, Well as soon as the O/S sees a drive it commandeers it and
makes it "Difficult" to get it running in another machine.

Curse Bill! No, Curse all the idiots who keep giving MS money for crap
products.

Ah, that is better. We should have these rants more often Jaz.

 

[Matthias Tacke]

Jaz wrote:

Phew! Feels good to get that off my chest.
So, any suggestions, ideas, or expressions of pity?

Thanks in advance,
JAZ
(Please excuse the 'burp' when replying)

What keeps you from using a linux on cd (like knoppix www.knopper.net),
boot it and use dd or dd_rescue to copy all stuff to the new place?

This way there is no need to boot with both drives attached and windows
"seeing" new and old at the same time.

 

[Jaz]

Jaz wrote:


What keeps you from using a linux on cd (like knoppix www.knopper.net),
boot it and use dd or dd_rescue to copy all stuff to the new place?

This way there is no need to boot with both drives attached and windows
"seeing" new and old at the same time.

Dan and Matthias,

Great suggestions!!!! Thank you both!!!!

Re Dan: I didn't know about robocopy.

Re: Matthias: Great idea booting to a Linux cdrom and running dd -- I
imaging the resulting filesystem will be the size of the source FS,
and I'll then need to expand/grow it into the free space. Any other
issues or problems to lookout for with dissimilar disk geometries?

JAZ

(Please excuse the 'burp' when replying)

 

[Matthias Tacke]

Dan and Matthias,

Great suggestions!!!! Thank you both!!!!

Re Dan: I didn't know about robocopy.

Re: Matthias: Great idea booting to a Linux cdrom and running dd -- I
imaging the resulting filesystem will be the size of the source FS,
and I'll then need to expand/grow it into the free space. Any other
issues or problems to lookout for with dissimilar disk geometries?

Copying with dd will leave the fs as is. I used pqmagic to change it for
ntfs/fat partitions. The partition table in the mbr is fixed then also.

If you like the unix way of mounting, why not put the additional space
of greater drives in seperate partitions and create junctions?

HTH

 

[Jaz]

Copying with dd will leave the fs as is. I used pqmagic to change it for
ntfs/fat partitions. The partition table in the mbr is fixed then also.

If you like the unix way of mounting, why not put the additional space
of greater drives in seperate partitions and create junctions?

HTH

Partition junction, what's your function (for those Electric Company
era kids out there...)

Cool. I guess I haven't been paying attention... NTFS finally comes of
age. What's really a gas is this: my top hit googling (that's a verb
now, right?) for "partition Junction" leads me to this quote:

"Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS junctions in Win2K.
Unfortunately, Win2K comes with no tools for creating junctions - you
have to purchase the Win2K Resource Kit, which comes the linkd program
for creating junctions. I therefore decided to write my own
junction-creating tool: Junction." (credit to Mark R., Sysinternals)

Haw haw! Thank GOD for you programmer types; us casual integrators
would be toast without you. We're not worthy!

JAZ
(Please excuse the 'burp' when replying)

 

[John Henders]

Re: Matthias: Great idea booting to a Linux cdrom and running dd -- I
imaging the resulting filesystem will be the size of the source FS,
and I'll then need to expand/grow it into the free space. Any other
issues or problems to lookout for with dissimilar disk geometries?

Why not just use tar? Knoppex should have mformat so you can prep the
new disk, if you haven't already done it under Windows.

 

[Matthias Tacke]

Jaz wrote:

Partition junction, what's your function (for those Electric Company
era kids out there...)

Cool. I guess I haven't been paying attention... NTFS finally comes of
age. What's really a gas is this: my top hit googling (that's a verb
now, right?) for "partition Junction" leads me to this quote:

"Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS junctions in Win2K.
Unfortunately, Win2K comes with no tools for creating junctions - you
have to purchase the Win2K Resource Kit, which comes the linkd program
for creating junctions. I therefore decided to write my own
junction-creating tool: Junction." (credit to Mark R., Sysinternals)

Haw haw! Thank GOD for you programmer types; us casual integrators
would be toast without you. We're not worthy!

You have the gui (disk management) to assign either a drive letter or an
empty folder on a ntfs partition.

Xp comes with fsutil.exe to do some more things from the command line.

HTH