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Trick: g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs

Wednesday, 06 October 2004

G4u ("ghost for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. First is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server. Other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk; network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the hard disk is processed as a image, any file system and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

Requirements:
- an empty 1.44MB floppy disk or an empty CD
- a FTP-server with some GB free space
- a DHCP-server

How does it work?

G4u supports all file systems. It reads the disk bit by bit, starting from byte #0 to the end. It includes any MBR, boot record, partition table and the partitions themselves without further investigating the structure of the data stored in these partitions. It is able to handle any operating system. Systems that were cloned successfully include NetBSD, Solaris/x86, Windows NT and 2000.

The system running g4u itself can have IDE or SCSI disks with various controllers as well as wide range of IDE and PCI network cards.

G4u is free software. Please read more here: