Alrighty...

Amused by the 'ghetto ghost' routine and using Tom's with netcat, I've
decided to try it myself.

Here at work we have 9 machines in our training lab running Bill's
OS.  Since every class involves different software, software gets
installed, uninstalled, re-installed, work files get created, deleted,
lost, etc and over the course of a month of training our machines are
screaming for help.

So, we want a solution for creating images of the drives so we can restore
them in a matter of minutes.  Since all the commercial software packages
(Ghost being the biggy) require licensing, it doesn't make sense to
purchase per-seat licenses for this small application.  So, I opened my
big mouth and "linux" came out.

I'm thinking of putting together a server out of parts in the basement and
adding a decent sized hard drive.  I'd do something like install Bill's OS
on a machine, then boot with Tom's and netcat the hard drive over to a
file on the linux server.  Then I want to burn that image to a
bootable CD so our not-so-linux lovers can easily do it when I'm not
around.  My predicament is this: I've never used netcat.  I've used DD for
something like this, which grabs not only the data, but every sector on
the drive so if I have a 4 GB drive with 500 MB used, I get a 4 GB
file.  Does netcat do the same thing?  If it does, it's a problem.  4 GBs
won't fit on any CDR.  Any iodeas how I could do this nicely?

_Brian