Quality of system images captured with (G)ImageX

ss26 · Post by **ss26** » Wed Mar 04, 2009 12:30 pm

Hi,

I'm using Wine 1.1.16 on Ubuntu 8.10 x86. ImageX is from Windows Vista SP1 AIK found here. And standalone imagex here. GImageX requires special library wimgapi.dll (goes with WAIK and standalone download). GImageX is of version 2.0.14 and is found here.

I have NTFS partition with XP, which i mount in ubuntu by clicking on it in nautilus, then entering password. If i'm not mistaken this partition is mounted by gnome with the help of ntfs-3g driver.
Then i capture entire partition with GImageX pointing it (GImageX) to related folder in /media (e.g. /media/disk-1 ). Of course, gimagex runs through wine. All goes well and i finish up with 2,7 GB *.wim image.

How does wine treat that mounted ntfs filesystem ? (under /media folder). I'm interested because if it is treated as ntfs, we can get images which are not worse than those captured thru WAIK live-cd.
Also taking into account imagex is incomplete to capture ntfs filesystem:

ImageX currently does not support the following NTFS features:

* Extended attributes.
* Object IDs.
* Reparse points that are neither symbolic links nor junctions. ImageX will fail to apply them.
* Sparse files. (They can be captured and applied, but they are no longer sparse after they are applied.)

quote from here.

Please people who know tell me.
Thank you for your time.

vitamin · Post by **vitamin** » Wed Mar 04, 2009 6:44 pm

Any direct hardware access does not function on Wine with few exceptions.

Wine does not care about what file system on a device. So none of the NTFS specific featurs are supported. So what you captured is pretty much useless. If you want a true byte-by-byte image - use 'dd'.

IneedAname · Post by **IneedAname** » Thu Mar 05, 2009 10:09 am

On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:30:14 -0600
"ss26" <[email protected]> wrote:

How does wine treat that mounted ntfs filesystem ? (under /media folder). I'm interested because if it is treated as ntfs, we can get images which are not worse than those captured thru WAIK live-cd.
Also taking into account imagex is incomplete to capture ntfs filesystem:

Install the program in your wine prefix and read the FAQ!

IneedAname · Post by **IneedAname** » Thu Mar 05, 2009 10:09 am

On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:30:14 -0600
"ss26" <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi,

I'm using Wine 1.1.16 on Ubuntu 8.10 x86. ImageX is from Windows Vista SP1 AIK found here (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en). And standalone imagex here (http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/imagex- ... -download/). GImageX requires special library wimgapi.dll (goes with WAIK and standalone download). GImageX is of version 2.0.14 and is found here (http://www.autoitscript.com/gimagex/).

I have NTFS partition with XP, which i mount in ubuntu by clicking on it in nautilus, then entering password. If i'm not mistaken this partition is mounted by gnome with the help of ntfs-3g driver.
Then i capture entire partition with GImageX pointing it (GImageX) to related folder in /media (e.g. /media/disk-1 ). Of course, gimagex runs through wine. All goes well and i finish up with 2,7 GB *.wim image.

How does wine treat that mounted ntfs filesystem ? (under /media folder). I'm interested because if it is treated as ntfs, we can get images which are not worse than those captured thru WAIK live-cd.
Also taking into account imagex is incomplete to capture ntfs filesystem:

ImageX currently does not support the following NTFS features:

* Extended attributes.
* Object IDs.
* Reparse points that are neither symbolic links nor junctions. ImageX will fail to apply them.
* Sparse files. (They can be captured and applied, but they are no longer sparse after they are applied.)
quote from here (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 22145.aspx).

Please people who know tell me.
Thank you for your time.

Sorry for the last post. reading this stuff half asleep does not work to well.

After reading the last link. I think the whole page is bull!

quote from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 22145.aspx
"Although ImageX can mount a .wim file with read/write permissions only from an NTFS file system, you can mount your image as read-only from NTFS, FAT, ISO, and UDF file systems. You cannot save changes to the image file while it is mounted as read-only."

You may as well use a tarball or a raw image file.

ss26 · Post by **ss26** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 8:56 am

vitamin wrote:Any direct hardware access does not function on Wine with few exceptions.

Wine does not care about what file system on a device. So none of the NTFS specific featurs are supported.

Thank you, it seems this was not a good idea.......

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 9:27 am

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 8:56 AM, ss26 <[email protected]> wrote:

vitamin wrote:
Any direct hardware access does not function on Wine with few exceptions.

Wine does not care about what file system on a device. So none of the NTFS specific featurs are supported.
Thank you, it seems this was not a good idea.......

It is a good idea because very few applications make use of rarely
used (and not needed) ntfs features to make them work. Being
skeptical, I believe the reason for the application doing this is just
to prevent the application from running under wine.

John

austin987 · Post by **austin987** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 11:41 am

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 8:27 AM, John Drescher <[email protected]> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 8:56 AM, ss26 <[email protected]> wrote:
vitamin wrote:
Any direct hardware access does not function on Wine with few exceptions.

Wine does not care about what file system on a device. So none of the NTFS specific featurs are supported.
Thank you, it seems this was not a good idea.......

It is a good idea because very few applications make use of rarely
used (and not needed) ntfs features to make them work. Being
skeptical, I believe the reason for the application doing this is just
to prevent the application from running under wine.

John

Doubtful. They probably don't want users to be able to get raw access
to the files.

--
-Austin

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 11:49 am

Doubtful. They probably don't want users to be able to get raw access
to the files.

That sounds more reasonable.

John

ss26 · Post by **ss26** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 12:57 pm

To finish my "report", l'm gonna to tell how it went.

So, during capture of XP (ntfs) mounted in Linux, gimagex was not able to recognize filesystem properly: it didn't exclude from image capture pagefile.sys, \Recycler, \system volume information as it normally did when it ran from WAIK live cd.

Capture went ok (exit code=0). Then i applied image to virtual drive inside VirtualBox with the help of waik live-cd. Filesystem structure (files and folders) was restored as it was at the time of capture.

I didn't finished test however (logging into xp) due to blue screen (stop 0x0000007B) during boot due to different hardware configurations on "old" and "new" systems....

ss26 · Post by **ss26** » Sat Mar 07, 2009 2:41 am

John Drescher wrote:On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 8:56 AM, ss26 <[email protected]> wrote:]
It is a good idea because very few applications make use of rarely
used (and not needed) ntfs features to make them work.

Thanks John. It seems you are right. No need to search for examples: see the link in my first post ^ about imagex and its inability to backup ntfs extended attributes under native (!) enironment (waik).
But i restored system images many times with (g)imagex and haven't noticed any broken thing (functionality) in windows xp itself or installed apps.