Backing Up your Laptop or PC - Easy!

I was using a program called G4L to image my laptop or pc but I have found a much easier way.  It works with Linux or Windows, no installation is needed, allows you to resize partitions, backup systems, access files, and recover lost data.  It is a live CD called "Redo".  Check it out here http://redobackup.org/.  It rocks!

Taken from the site:

Redo Backup and Recovery is so simple that anyone can use it. It is the easiest, most complete disaster recovery solution available. It allows bare-metal restore. Bare metal restore means that even if your hard drive melts or gets completely erased by a virus, you can have a completely-functional system back up and running in as little as 10 minutes.


All your documents and settings will be restored to the exact same state they were in when the last snapshot was taken. Redo Backup and Recovery is a live CD, so it does not matter if you use Windows or Linux. You can use the same tool to backup and restore every machine. And because it is open source released under the GPL, it is completely free for personal and commercial use.

Converting a Physical Server (or Virtual Server) to Oracle VM (or Xen)

I needed to move some physical Windows 2003 servers.  The site I wanted to move these servers to already had a substantial Oracle VM Server environment that I had built up.  Oracle VM is based off of Xen.  Using Oracle's P2V whitepaper led me to a converted virtual machine that would not boot.  After much searching I found a process that worked for me.  Pulling from different areas on the web the process I came up with is this.

Note:  This process works for Physical servers or Virtual servers (Example:  VMWare).

   1. On the server you wish to convert you need to do some prep work.  You'll need to make sure the server has ide device drivers available and the registry needs to be made aware.  Believe it or not Microsoft has a KB article that details what we need to do.  The section of this KB article we need is under the heading "More Information".  The article can be found here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082
   2. In summary you need to extract the Atapi.sys, Intelide.sys, Pciide.sys, and Pciidex.sys files from the %SystemRoot%\Driver Cache\I386\Driver.cab file and copy the files to the %SystemRoot%\System32\Drivers folder and then copy the registry section to a file (Example: mergeide.reg) and merge the file in to the registry.
   3. Use the free VMWare converter tool to convert the Physical machine to a vmdk file.  If you are doing this on a server (HP or Dell for example) make sure you unselect any management partitions.
   4. Copy this vmdk file to your Oracle VM (or Xen) Server and run the following command:  # qemu-img convert (filename).vmdk (filename).img
   5. Then create a Windows 2003 guest VM (or which ever the OS is of the box you are converting) and make sure it is shutdown.
   6. Remove the img file for the guest you just created and replace it with the one you created in step 4.  Make sure you rename your new image file to the same name as the one you removed in the beginning of step 6.
   7. The guest VM should boot up.  Once your image is up, remove any VMWare tools or conversion programs and remove any Vendor specific management programs (example HP or Dell utilities).


Done.  This process worked for me.  Hope it will help you too.