[SWLUG] Taking a disk image

[Dave Cridland]

On Fri Jan 26 12:09:29 2007, Bradley, Peter wrote:
> Does anyone know of a tool that will take an image of all my disk
> partitions (Linux and Windows), and the MBR, so that I could - if I
> wanted - just slap in a new HDD and write the image to it such that 
> it
> would then boot up and I'd be back to normal?

Astonishingly, cat will do the job:

cat /dev/hda >disk_image_file

cat disk_image_file >/dev/hda

Obviously you do end up with quite big files, and I'm not 100% sure 
it'll work with the disk (hda) as opposed to a partition (hda1) very 
sensibly, so I'd probably do that with the partition rather than the 
disk.

In general, though, I'd be more inclined to keep backups, and use 
distributions that supported the stuff I needed as simply as 
possible. Personally, I tend to keep important applications installed 
on both my laptop and my desktop, so at least I can copy the configs 
between them. (This doesn't always work, mind - my laptop doesn't 
have the space for some stuff).

Dave.
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