DISK IMAGING

The company was found in 1993 in Canada and is a leading provider of firmware-embedded endpoint security and managment for computers and mobile devices. Their solutions provide orgniztions with comprehensive visibility and control over all of their endpoints, anywhere, anytime.

With the need to backup or restore the OS/image.partition/disk for a thousand of new manufacturing PCs and laptops of building large scale clients,ect...It does not work for administrator by doing traditional way to install OS one by one or make a copy of disk one to one. Realized the needs, customer one to one.

Realized the needs, customers desired to develop the applitcation that allow backup restore a single partition or the whole hard hisk to larfe number of laptop/devices over the nerwork wwith the following features:

• Backups a partition or the whole hard disk to a single image file and store ut ti the network storage.
• Restores a partition or the whole hard disk from an image file which is stored on network storage.
• Support booting from LAN for automatically backup/restore.
• Supports multiple network  storage: FPT,TFTP and SMB.
• Supports multiple hard disk formats: FAT, NTFS,EXT and HFS.
• Supports compression,spitting.

Reduced at least 40% of development cost.

Low cost of integrating the application intro core system.

The new application was proposed to be developed wwithin 5 months by C++ using PXE protocol and Ghost concept as a base. Devices with PXE protocol enable will automatically get IP from DHCP server and conect to the image server to download the neccessary package and install  into the local hard disk remotely. The following technologies and features were proposed:

- Implements PXE server that consist of:

     TFTP serve : follow RFC- 1350 and RFC-2347

     Boot strap server: follow the PXE specification version 2.1 from intel.

- Uses PXELinux bootstrap and customize winPE for booting from LAN.

- Draw disk backup to support unknow partition formats.

- Support resizing disk/partition restoreation for known partition formats.

Implement FTP server following RFC-959

uses ZIP library to support compression reducing image file size and time transferring over network.

Programing:

• Language: C++
• Library: Zip

Tools:

• MS visual studio 2005
• CPP unit, PCLint
• Tracking database: redmine, subversion.

Operating System 

• Windows XP/ win 7
• Win PE