Quote Originally Posted by bizarro
thanx for your input...i really appreciate it

with your testing experience maybe you can answer a couple of questions for me with this scenario...

a laptop's hdd is corrupted and windows can no longer boot. with the rcd you can get to the data

1. the data backing up either by dd, partimage or 7z will be larger than 2gb.
2. backup will be to a network share using samba

can the backup happen with out corruption?
From what I know about samba it won't alow files bigger then 2 gigs.

If you were to dd the drive over to an image on a remote computer then you would have to split it.

Code:
dd if=/dev/hdX | gzip -c | split -b 1024m - /samba/hdimage.img.gz.
Then you would need to put the file back together on the remote computer. Luckly, a batch file can do that job.

Code:
Copy /b hdimage.img.gz.aa + hdimage.img.gz.ab + hdimage.img.gz.ac ... + hdimage.img.gz.nnn hdimage.img.gz
Now you can md5sum the file and drive and check out if they are the same.

You could basicly do the same thing with a 7z archive. Just first make the archieve, then split it for transport.
Code:
split -b 1024m hdbackup.7z /samba/hdbackup.7z.
You can then put it back together the same way.

Of course all this spliting stuff can be bypassed if you use something that alows bigger files to be transported, mabye ftp or SSH.