Ever been caught without the proper drivers for a particular NIC for the Zenworks Boot CD? Instead of trying to compile new NIC drivers in the kernel and adding them to the Boot CD, try this generic solutions to image to a USB hardrive and wait for the official release of imaging drivers from Novell. This gives you a workaround which should last and not need constant updating.

Step 1: Prepare the USB Hard drive for use with ZENworks Imaging

1. The first step in this is to create an ext2fs partition on the external hard drive. This is to get over the 2GB file-size limitation Linux has on Fat 32 partitions. To do this I used the GParted utility in the System Rescue CD. An ISO and further instructions for use can be found here.
2. Boot to the CD.
3. Type startx to bring up the graphical interface.
4. Double-click on the highlighted icon on the right side of the screen to open the gparted partitioning tool.
5. You should create and format a partition at least as big as the image you want to create. I would suggest a minimum of 30Gb to give you plenty of space, the rest of the disk can be partitioned and formatted as NTFS/Fat32 and used with your Windows PC without affecting the ZENworks images.

Step 2: Mount the USB Hard Drive Within the ZENworks Boot CD environment

1. Attach your USB Hard Drive to the PC you want to image.
2. Insert ZENworks 7 Boot CD and restart the PC.
3. When prompted, select Manual Mode and boot as normal.
4. Start Imaging application (img).
5. Press F8 to Modify partitions. You will now see a list of devices attached to your PC.
6. Find the one that has partition type of "Linux EXT2". Take note of this as this is the device you need to mount.
7. Exit Imaging application.
8. Now you need to create a mount point for the USB hard drive. Do this by typing:
   mkdir /mnt/usbhd.
9. To mount the drive type the following command:
   mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbhd
   (change /dev/sdb1 to the device you noted earlier)
10. The drive is now mounted to /mnt/usbhd.

Step 3: Start Imaging to USB Hard Drive

1. Type img at bash prompt to load imaging application.
2. Select Make Image.
3. Select Local as destination.
4. Type path as /mnt/usbhd/<filename>.zmg
5. Start Image creation.

Step 4: Copy Image from USB Hard Drive (optional)

1. Attach the USB Hard Drive to a PC running Windows.
2. Install the ext2fsd driver (which can be downloaded from here). This will allow you to access the ext2fs (linux) file system from Windows and copy to another drive.
3. Once loaded you can view the ext2fs file system as normal and copy, delete, etc., from Windows Explorer.

Tags | Netware, Windows Vista, Windows XP