This is a script to copy a drive sector by sector to a compressed image file. It uses 7zip (7za) with a 128 megabyte dictionary and is mutlithreaded to make the best possible use of your cpu. I've used this against NTFS drives and HPFS+ (MacOS) drives to create a rescue disk from known working installations for later use in case of harddisk failure..

This script can

• Copy drive to image
• Extract image to drive
• Wipe free space on any file system your Linux installation can write to
• Automate connecting to Windows SMB shares

For best results, I recommend  you:

1. Install all software and updates you intend to use EXCEPT ANTIVIRUS AND FIREWALL (AV and firewall products rapidly fall out of date and are best downloaded fresh and installed at the time of deployment)
2. Defrag the drive if the OS offers the option to do so
3. ZERO out the freespace - (for MacOS you can use the Disk utility - look for  "Erase Freespace") for windows, and any other file system your installation has write support for, you can use the function built into the script

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• 2GB ram
• dd
• 7Zip (7za)
• pv

This script was written for and most recently  tested against SystemRescueCD v2.30

CHANGELOG

v.08

• Added more error checking
• fixed some of the wording on the prompts and cleaned up the helpfile a bit
  

v.07

• cleaned up zerofreespace code a bit more
• cleaned up help section

v.06

• fixed broken zerofreespace code
• fixed file share mount code

v.05

• Added automation to connect to windows SMB shares without having to remember all the switches needed. now its as simple as "ddimager -connect //mysever/myshare /mountpoint

Attachments:

ddimager v.06	[ ]	4 Kb
ddimager v.07	[ ]	4 Kb
ddimager v.08	[ ]	5 Kb