[kwlug-disc] Using linux to fix Windows

[Rashkae]

Chris Bruner wrote:
>  It would take some experimenting, but I'm thinking that there are two
> steps to do a factory restore.
> 1. format the drive.
> 2. write the smallest possible image which fits into the formated drive.
> 
> You can use dd to create the image, but figuring out the size needed may
> be hard.
> 

Use ntfsclone with the system image file option, pipe through
compression, (gzip, of if you have multi-core cpu's, use 7zip, which is
threaded and will be nearly twice as fast.)  Unlike dd, ntfsclone will
only copy used sectors of the hard drive, which is important, since a dd
copy of a hard drive will include lots of data from deleted files
(remember that a deleted file is not physically zeroed out on disc, but
is only casually eventually overwritten)