I am new to QNX, none the less have been charged with maintenance on a QNX 4.25 system. One thing I would like to do is create disk images of all the hdd’s. Some are in Beckhoffs, some are in Dells.
One of the contractors that installed this system, a QNX guru, told me that I could do this with a program called Ghost.
Does anyone know where I can obtain a version of Ghost for QNX? Or does it run from a DOS disk or something?
Further, are there CDROM R/W drives and drivers available for QNX 4.25 ? I need something to put the images on, assuming I can actually create them.
might work - assuming you are copying to another drive/machine for the destination.
Ghost is a windows program as far as I know. The problem is that even with an image, what if the new drive (when you need it) is a different layout in terms of heads, sectors, etc. You back up a 5 gig drive today and when you need to replace it, you won’t even be able to buy less than a 100 gig.
I would suggest that you want to make backups in the more traditional unix style but there are even issues with that. You can backup the files, but making the replacement system bootable take a couple additional step because the /.boot files (and a couple others) are special.
You can use dd as well, the ghost utility is a clonning tool from symantech, you can download it from their home page, the current version is 7.0 and support lots of file systems, and you can resize the partition on the fly if you want, you need to make a winBug boot disk and run the ghost7.exe from it.
Be carefull to clone to a disk larger then the size of the image you created, I mean from a 20GB hard disk to a 20 GB or 40GB there is no problem.
Hi. You have a couple of options for imaging the system. Symantec Ghost and PowerQuest ImageCenter (formerly DriveImage) run in DOS and can image the QNX filesystem. There is also a free GPL-licensed tool called Partimage, I have not used Partimage, but I know it supports supports a LOT of filesystems.
I have used ImageCenter and Ghost both to image QNX systems on Beckhoff, Dell, and IBM systems and they work great. An image will work well as a backup tool, but be aware that if you change the hardware at all, the image may or may not work when restored to the system. Hope this helps.
I think the information given here on Ghost is a little sloppy. Yes it will image a QNX partition, as it will image any partition when it doesn’t know the format. It will create a file with every sector, even the unused ones. It can’t be used to resize a partition, thus the advice to always use the same hardware. One important problem is that you have to be running an OS that Ghost runs on, usually DOS.
I do not believe there are any free drivers for writing CD-R or CD-RW disks for QNX 4. I think I heard of a commercial product at one time, but I don’t have any more information on it. What you can do is create an image file that can be burned into a CD. There is a Linux utility that has been ported to QNX that does this. There are two obvious ways to use this. 1) Create the image file right onto a DOS partition, and then reboot into Windows where you have software to burn the image. 2) Write the image to a QNX file, and then use FTP, SAMBA, NFS or whatever to copy it to a Windows machine. As pointed out, you might need an extra step or two to recreate the QNX disk because of the .boot file, and in addition if you are using old style licensing, copying the license files alone will not do what you want.
I think dd is just a copy utility, so you might use like this:
dd if=/dev/hd0t77 of=/dev/hd1t77
You will have to create the new partition and mount it yourself before running.
This is not a file by file copy of the disks, so it will not de-frag the drive. If you’ve
gone this far, you might as well use cp to copy the files, and license to copy any licenses.
I have had some success using ghost 2003 to image QNX drives that are LBA mode. I have been unsuccessful so far with drives that are CHS mode, norton for some reason won’t allow me to keep the exact same partition sizes. One thing about ghost is if you copy partitions you can change the size. I have converted 80GB drives to 6.4GB that way(don’t need the large drives). I am trying dd right now for my CHS mode drives. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
