Make image of ENTIRE hard disk?

Message

rookworm · #1 Post by **rookworm** » Sat Nov 12, 2005 3:57 am

I am attempting to create a backup of the entire hard drive of my T42, with all of my custom configurations, and the rescue partition (Access IBM and restore functionality) intact. I assume that this is possible by using a linux live cd and the "dd" command, but I'm not sure if this will capture everything.

1- will it?
2- can i make an image of each partition and the mbr (separately), and then restore them to a different sized hard drive in the future, and have it just work? if not, what else do I need to do?

DIGITALgimpus · #2 Post by **DIGITALgimpus** » Sat Nov 12, 2005 9:04 am

dd *should* work, though I haven't tested this. It will be very slow, since dd will read bit for bit.

May want to try something like Acronis True Image, which will be much faster.

kyrotech · #3 Post by **kyrotech** » Sat Nov 12, 2005 9:37 am

or symantec ghost 9 using the -ib switch

#4 Post by **JaneL** » Sat Nov 12, 2005 9:48 am

Since this has been asked at least 937 times already, I think it qualifies as a FAQ. If someone wants to formulate the question and answers, I'll add it.

rookworm · #5 Post by **rookworm** » Sun Nov 13, 2005 5:36 pm

What I did:

booted form a knoppix live cd, mounted my desktop's shared directory with samba, and then typed:

dd if=/dev/hda | bzip2 | split - backup.img.bz2. -b 512m

It took 12 hours, and created about 11gb of files for my 40gb hard drive (fresh from factory, with ms office installed)

There has to be a better way........

dansu · #6 Post by **dansu** » Sun Nov 13, 2005 7:13 pm

12 hours? that's no good. I used Acronis True Image with the normal compression setting. Took about 11 minutes.

cws · #7 Post by **cws** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 8:02 am

Unfortunely, Acronis True Image does not known all the partition type on my disk (it's FreeBSD/Windows XP dual boot).

So, in my case I use g4u ( http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ ).

DIGITALgimpus · #8 Post by **DIGITALgimpus** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 10:09 am

dd will take a while because it does a "bare metal" copy. i.e. bit by bit. Even blank space is copied.

Acronis knows the filesystem, and just copies the files, hence quicker. Then copies the partition structure and MBR.

aw · #9 Post by aw » Tue Nov 15, 2005 1:56 pm

rookworm wrote:What I did:

booted form a knoppix live cd, mounted my desktop's shared directory with samba, and then typed:

dd if=/dev/hda | bzip2 | split - backup.img.bz2. -b 512m

It took 12 hours, and created about 11gb of files for my 40gb hard drive (fresh from factory, with ms office installed)

There has to be a better way........

Check out partimage. It comes with Knoppix. I went through the same process as you except I used partimage instead of dd. My most recent backup was just over 10g (compressed with gzip). It took less than 2 hours to create it.... about the same to restore. Partimage only copies the blocks in use (similar to ghost and others).

NTFS support is "experimental", but it worked for me. From what I understand the problems can occur when you attempt to backup a highly fragmented NTFS partition. If you are doing a backup of a fresh install, this will not be a problem. You can also test your backups once created so you know they will work.

I used partimage to create / restore my drive image several times with my new t42... couldn't be happier with the results.

Make image of ENTIRE hard disk?

Make image of ENTIRE hard disk?

Try partimage instead of dd

Who is online