I was looking around for a way to clone one hard drive to another, and I ran across an interesting utility called PartImage. Originally, I tried to image one 100GB drive to another using a normal dd command, like so:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

I let that run for about 20 hours and it still wasn’t done! Partimage seemed like a better choice since it only copies the existing data on the drive, and not all of the empty space too. But better, yet, you can get a whole rescue CD that has a PartitionMagic clone included!

Partimage has some nifty features, like compression (I had a 20GB image file compressed to about 8GB) and backup over a network. QtParted is the nifty PartitionMagic clone that has a GUI and uses the QT framebuffer (you don’t need an X server running to get the GUI) and works great. I’m not afraid of fdisk, but I think I’ll use the QtParted from now on. Anyway, grab the System Rescue CD from http://www.sysresccd.org/.

In other news, I’ve spent the last 3 1/2 weeks back in the US, and I’ve become increasingly disgusted by the political discussions going on. I guess the worst part of it all is hearing people that support the Bush regime that are purely emotional in thier support: “At least he stands up for what he believes in!” (have you looked at what he believes in? THAT is the real problem!), or “He’s bringing God back to the government” (guess you don’t believe in separation of church and state), or “I think the war on terror in Iraq that he’s doing is a good thing!” (sorry, the rest of the world knows that Iraq has – zero – to do with the war on terror. And the strategy of the Bush regime to scare people into voting for him is so obvious – it is upsetting that so many people in the US won’t see this until it is too late.

I tried to have a conversation with a genuine Bush regime supporter, and he ended up drifing into a rant about flip-flops, Vietnam, and a stern “At least he stands up for what he believes!”. He ended up storming off muttering, but I complimented him for at least having an opinion, which many times people just don’t have today. The funniest thing about our conversation is that he accused me of being biased by the US media – I guess he didn’t remember that I don’t live in the US, and don’t watch US news. His claims of being objective (while he watches US news regularly) struck me as extremely funny considering the irony involved.

Anyway, one thing that I’m pretty certain of: if the US has another 4 years of Bush regime, I don’t think I’ll be coming back here to live anytime soon.