The dd imaging utility Question NO Bug Report

[TD - Sales International Holland B.V.]

Hey there,

I've got a fairly complicated question. This is NOT a bug report. I know
this is the email addy to send bugs to but I couldn't find another email
address in the man page. Sorry :-)

First a little explanation so things might be clearer. We are a fairly small
company and we do not have any programmers. :-((. What we want to do is make
some sort of restore CD like the CD's from HP and Compaq etc. Now they have
their own utilities, we were thinking about ghost, but the licenses are too
expensive for this kind of usage. Now I make images from floppies on my
linux which I then can set back using dd if=<floppy image file>
of=/dev/fd0u1440. We were thinking we could make a bootable CD which has an
autoexec.bat which does sortta the same but then with harddisk images and
the dd utility. However there is 1 problem with dd that I cannot overcome.
It makes great images, however there are as big as the harddisk. Now a clean
Windows 98/ME/2000 installation takes about 200MB give or take several MB's,
however dd images the harddisk entirely. Having a 20GB harddisk for instance
this would never fit on a CD. So the quesion is, is there a variant of dd or
can dd either compress the empty space, which should result in like 10kBytes
for 19,8GB empty space so we can burn the image on CD and then use the DOS
dd utility from a bootable CD to set the image back. Now that I think of it,
maybe there's a possibility we can direct the image through gzip so we won't
ever need the diskspace for the fullimage but it gets comprimised in memory
and do the same for setting it back? We are allowed to use dd in this way
right? Aslong as we keep the disclaimers n stuff right? (I'm not native
english and I don't understand a whole lot of laws).

Anyways any help would be greatly appreciated. I'll be playing around with
it for now to see if I can figure out some way to redirect it through gzip.
Perhaps this will make it a very slow process though....

Kind regards,

Ferry van Steen
Technical Service
Sales International Holland B.V.
Nikkelstraat 22
4823 AB Breda
Phone +31 (0)76 - 542 91 91
Fax +31 (0)76 - 542 44 33