G4U is an Open Source disk imaging tool that can image entire hard drives or individual partitions either locally (physically attached hard drive) or over a network using FTP. This document relates to using G4U to image over a network.

Tools needed:

1. an FTP account on a server with sufficient space to store potentially LARGE images.
2. A bootable G4U CD
3. network connection to FTP server

FTP setup

Essentially any standard FTP server will do. I'm using vsftp on a linux server. Set up an account with read/write privileges:

Insert the bootable G4U cdrom in the machine to be imaged and start it. Make sure the machine can boot to the CD. On starting type disks to get a listing of the hard drives on the local machine , and parts for a list of partitions. You'll need these to specify the media to image or restore to. After that it's as simple as typing in the following to image a disk to the server:

uploaddisk <user>@<hostname> <image_name.gz> <drive or partition>

For the above scenario I used:

uploaddisk ftpsecure@192.168.123.120 sitekiosk_ipaq.gz wd0