I am having trouble copying my NTFS windows partition with partimage to an NTFS disk... I mount the disk that I am writing to with this instruction: "mount -t captive-ntfs -o --rw /dev/sda5 /mnt/storage" then I try to make the image of my Windows Disk with partimage, but first of all it is slow as heck... I think that it only gets about 20MiB/s tops, but I believe that this is because I am using captive, and the second problem is that I get some funky errors after about 1.7gb...

Is there a way for me to speed up this backup process? Other than converting one of my drives to Fat32 or any other type of file system? Is there a way for me to just use "mount -t ntfs -o --rw /dev/sda5 /mnt/storage" and have partimage overwrite an existing file (one that I created beforehand for this purpose)? Does it work that way?

Did the program give me errors because I was writing to a disk that is a bit fragmented?

I'm sorry I really have no idea where else to put this... It's not exactly a Linux problem but it also isn't exactly a Windows problem either...

Thank you for your time.

P.S.

I am using SysRescCD to try and do this process, not sure if you guys are familiar with this project or not, so here is it's homepage: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

I can not offer much help since I've only used partimage with linux filesystems but AFAIK the NTFS filesystem is still not fully supported. Fragementation might be an issue. Are you saving the image to a linux or NTFS filesystem?

I'm creating an image of an NTFS filesystem and trying to store the image in an NTFS filesystem.

Since I was having problems with this I tried to com up with a solution using Qemu and setting two different drives that it would use. The OS that I would be running was a Live CD called SysRescCD, this linux distro is for system recovery, in other words it has a whole mess of filesystem related programs... Anyway, I set my windows partition as the second drive, and then I created a virtual drive (6gb in size if i'm not mistakened) then I started up Qemu and in the end I was able to backup my Windows Partition into an image file into the virtual drive (the drive was formated in fat32 so that I could get the files easily, I can just use qemu-image to convert the virtual drive format to the one used in VMware and then I could use VMmount to mount the virtual drive as an actual drive, and then transfer the files to my real drive ) the only problem is that I don't know if it created a suitable image of the partition or not, I'm not sure if windows is always sending information to the disk or not, even when no apparent program is running, so I'm guessing that the method that I used was not suitable...

Anyway, I tried to make the image again the real way, and it gave me the same error... the thing is that I had defragmented every single one of my harddrives... so... I gave up on trying to make the image file on an NTFS partition, and luckily just happened to have an 8gig Harddrive at home (I had forgotten about it...), I formatted it and made image file on the Fat32 partition this time and it went smoothly, it transfered at about 2GiB/min, and oh, I forgot to mention that the values that I posted in my last post were incorrect, I wasn't transfering at 20MiB/sec... it was 20MiB/min...