Backup Linux System

[sakiZ]

Ok, I'm looking at your dd to an image.

I want to try doing that to a different partition on my Windows XP drive.

I'm thinking if I totally defrag the partition first in XP and back it up first I should be OK to try it.

sakiZ

[bfree]

Ok, I'm looking at your dd to an image.

I want to try doing that to a different partition on my Windows XP drive.

I'm thinking if I totally defrag the partition first in XP and back it up first I should be OK to try it.

If the partition you want to write the image on is an ntfs formatted partition then I wouldn't bother trying to do it under Linux, either you will have to use paragons ntfs drivers (which I gather are reasonable), or use captive-ntfs which is horribly horribly slow or use linux's normal ntfs tools which means you'ld probably have to figure out what size the file would be (exactly) first, then allocate a file that size in windows on the ntfs drive and finally go into Knoppix and do your dd (hoping it comes out the same size), this is because with normal ntfs write support on Linux you can only write to files without changing the filesize and it can't add/remove files or folders!

If it is a fat partition or some Linux type then it shouldn't be a problem (whether you defrag it or not, but it probably only makes sense to defrag it if it is a fat partition, the default from dos and Windows 9x).

[sakiZ]

Hey Bfree,

Thanks to you I tried your "dd" trick and it worked!!!

I defragged my partition to recieve the image file, scanned it for errors and backed it up, all in Windows XP.

I booted into Knoppix and did the "dd" command you gave me to create the hdb2.img file.
So far so good.

Next I followed your second step and created the loop mount. Well, I'll be!!! There is my image file appearing as a mirrored clone in my root directory!!!! Amazing.

So to make a clone I do:

"dd if=/mnt/hda6/hdb2.img /dev/hdb2"

If this were to be a clone of my Knoppix set up on a NEW drive would the command then actually be:

"dd if=/mnt/hda6/hdb2.img /dev/had1" ???

Thanks so much for your help.

Windows could never do anything like this.

sakiZ

[bfree]

So to make a clone I do:

"dd if=/mnt/hda6/hdb2.img /dev/hdb2"

If this were to be a clone of my Knoppix set up on a NEW drive would the command then actually be:

"dd if=/mnt/hda6/hdb2.img /dev/had1" ???

Not quite. To restore/clone the image into a partition do

dd if=/mnt/hda6/hdb2.img of=/dev/hdb2"

If you were putting it onto a new drive you would again use the of=. Aswell as that you would proably have to use a rescue disk to tweak the system (fix the bootloader and /etc/fstab) before you could boot it. If it's windows on the other hard I'm not sure what you can do apart from restore it to the same position on a new drive with the same partition table as the original device (you can backup the masterboot record and partition table of your drive with "dd if=/dev/hda of=hda-start bs=512 count=1" and restore it with the reverse) which I'm 99% certain will be ok.

Just to point out one last trick, you can dd an entire disk device, e.g. "dd if=/dev/hda of=hda.img" and "dd if=hda.img of=hdb" but mounting the images from within these requires you to use some tricks to give an offset argument to mount. Here's instructions.