On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Brian Dessent wrote: > Hugh Sasse wrote: > > > Trying to copy a windows XP NTFS drive to a big disk using cygwin tools > > I encounter inaccessible files such as ntusers.dat. tar is not > > ntuser.dat is the filename of the per-user registry hive > (HKEY_CURRENT_USER). It is opened by the system in exclusive mode, so > it cannot be opened.
Yes, that one I understand, the others I don't. > > > I suspect this is a common problem, but don't know how to frame it > > correctly to extract something useful from Google. The setup in > > question only has the one PC so things like rsync are out. Windows > > Note that rsync works just fine as a local copying tool like xcopy. > There's nothing that says you have to use it with a remote machine. But Just the "r" :-) OK, I'll look into that, thank you. > it will be of no use to you in this case. Because it won't access things either? I can live without ntuser.dat but its knowing what the others are and why they fail that is part of the problem. > > > keeps some things in use, but I don't know what. Can anyone point > > me at the specific thing I should be reading, or suggest anything? > > If you mail me off list then, if there is interest I will summarize > > to the list. Thank you. > > You can't open the file because it's been opened with a sharing mode > that disallows any other process to open it. The third parameter of > CreateFile() is dwShareMode and can one or more of FILE_SHARE_DELETE, > FILE_SHARE_READ, FILE_SHARE_WRITE. If it is 0 then no sharing is > allowed, and the file cannot be opened by any other process until the > handle is closed. So I'd need to boot off something else to get everything then? > > This is why backup programs are more than just file copying utilities. > There are a number of files that you can't just copy from a live > system. Even if you could forcibly open the file, if you were to > na?vely copy it you might get inconsistent state, since the whole point > for opening a file exclusively is so that you can have full control over > it and implement your own form of transactions. A good case to consider. So some databases will also fail if they are live. > > Starting with XP, Microsoft introduced the Volume Shadow Copy service, > as the other reply in this thread indicated. This is a vastly > complicated[1] COM interface that can be used by backup programs to get See what you mean! > consistent state for all files on a live system. Certainly no Cygwin > tool or app uses this API. Thank you. > > What I do is simply use the built in Windows backup program (ntbackup) > to create a backup to a file. Ntbackup uses all the proper backup APIs > and can deal with all in-use files correctly, and the resulting output > is just a plain file that can be copied around with standard tools, or > split/burned to DVDR, or whatever. Can it extract individual files from the backup? I don't want to copy old Windows System files on to the new machine when it appears. > > Brian > > [1] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384589.aspx >
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