Bootable image maker?

[serverbaboon]

I ordered some copies of acronis trueimage for workstations in the office. Great.! Doesn't work on the servers, for no reason other than acronis wants to charge me up the yin yang (1k+) for each license of acronis server. An image of a hard drive is an image, so what the heck.
Here's the question:
Is there a bootable linux distribution that will make an image of the server hard drives? That would be sweet and save me a bunch of trouble. Or maybe some open source imaging software, preferably that isn't terrible and will break the company servers
Anyone have recommendations, or experience with a linux livecd or open source backup that will work with windows server 03?

Thanks in advance,
Serverbaboon.

 

[KSoD]

Have you looked into CloneZilla or FOG?

 

[serverbaboon]

I've never heard of FOG before. That looks somewhat promising.

 

[KSoD]

Jayce is the person who knows all about that program. I am sure he will be around at some point to give his input. He will be able to answer more questions about it than me.

 

[kmote]

I've used cloneZilla and It wasn't bad. The instructions aren't incredibly clear but it was able to create an image of a couple of laptops and send them up to my server via ssh.

 

[serverbaboon]

I've used cloneZilla and It wasn't bad. The instructions aren't incredibly clear but it was able to create an image of a couple of laptops and send them up to my server via ssh.

Well now it looks like the bootable clonezilla might be a better idea if I'm only trying to copy server hard drives. I'm worried because years ago I've had a livecd mess up my partitions, and I'd for sure get fired if a server went down. . I've used linux for almost 10 years and go back to programming in the dos days, but I'm pretty skeptical of live cds not messing anything up Looks like it might be my best shot though. I just dl clonezilla and I'm going to take it for a test run. I'll keep you all posted.

 

[Jayce]

For what you're doing, Clonezilla LiveCD would probably be more practical. Clonezilla seems to be a little more versatile when it comes to dealing with a single machine. You can do it by individual partitions or the entire drive structure. FOG really shines when it comes to mass imaging systems. Sure, it can be used to image 1 system easily, but why set up a Linux box + FOG when you can just use a Clonezilla LiveCD?

Like anything else, run it on a test machine before you run it on production equipment, especially if it's a server that is mission critical. I'd set up a spare Win 03 box, install a bunch of crap on it, services, dhcp server/dns/whatever (just for kicks and giggles to make it as realistic as possible) and upload the image to external media (external hard drive, samba share, whatever works but external hdd is easiest). Once done, on the Win 03 *TEST* machine, blast the install by formatting it or putting in a blank hard drive, and fire up Clonezilla and push the image back down and see if you're back in business.

Just make sure you go through the menu slow at first so you get the hang of the process.

That's at least what I would do. I'd rather spend 10 hours working on test machines to image a server 1 time and get it right instead of spending 10 minutes working on test machines, but then 20 hours re-building the server I fried.