Image Guide and ATI Drivers

Anyone got a guide for gparted or something to make an image? I wanted to make image of my HTPC install so if I need to re-install I can save myself some time. Comprehension level 6th grade or below appreciated.

Also, is there any ATI 3450 or 4200 drivers? I tried to enable desktop effects, but it said I could not, not even the middle one. I know they're not the greatest, but It would be nice to get it working if possible.

On the plus side I managed to get my Magicolor 1600w working through my Asus router, which has a print server. Karmic had the driver, which surprised me, but it's been a while since I did it. It's a little slow as compared to Windows, but it works, which is all I need. Thanks for any help.

 

You might check through the posts for something I wrote a couple years ago about copying drives to a larger one, but the easiest way to make an image:

Boot from a LiveCD, have an external drive with free space equal or greater than the space on the drive you want to back up. I'm assuming that the drive you want to back up is /dev/sda and the target drive is mounted on /media/share. Make sure it's using an ext3 or NTFS filesystem or something.

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -9 > /media/share/hdimage.gz

This can take a while. After it's done, you have the image. To restore it:

Code:

gunzip /media/share/hdimage.gz - | dd of=/dev/sda

As for the 3450/4200, there's not much working with them yet. You MIGHT try the FC12 games spin, that should have the latest open-source drivers. That stuff is still in major flux though, and the fglrx drivers just suck. You probably just won't be able to enable desktop effects in the short term.

 

Thanks Pita. I'll give it whirl. It's just the main drive. I told the Ubuntu installer to use the whole drive. If it doesn't work it's not a huge deal. They're just media servers. I can do a complete install in about a 10th of the time it takes me to do Windows. I don't put much on there. I'm curious, what's a Ubunutu partition size these days? I got some stuff on there like my Mp3s and TV shows, but I can dump those off before I do the image. Thanks again.

 

Umm, i had desktop effects working fine on my 3450 with the fglrx drivers, and i could also play some games. Don't know about the 4500MHD.

The only thing it bugged on was viewing windowed video when desktop effects were enabled. Also video hardware acceleration worked great, when watching videos (even HD) i could turn the CPU speed all the way down to 400MHz!