Quote Originally Posted by setht
So if I understand that, copying a 300GB IDE Maxtor using dd would require me to purchase another set of 300GB IDE Maxtors. Am I mistaken?
That is correct, you are mistaken. As you pointed out dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image would make a image of the device hdx (in this cast the 300 gig maxtor) on any partition with enough space to hold it. A 500 gig SATA would hold it nicely, a 750 gig SATA (unfortunately currently more expensive per gigabyte than the 500 gig disks) would hold two. I had not even thought about compression but that very likely would let you store two images on one 500 gig device. dd is very powerful and you could split an image across 2 files on different partitions (requires specifying starting and ending points of each part of the dump). You have lots of options.