G Gambill said:
> I have a Win 2K laptop with USB.
>
> I also have a large external USB drive that is recognized and mounted
> with ubuntu live.
>
> I would like to backup the Win drive is such a way that I could
> reinstall from the backup just incase.
>
> Any suggestions?

The most direct solution is 'dd' to make an image.

1. Boot ubuntu live.
2. Don't mount the laptop hard drive.
3. Mount the USB hard drive.

I am assuming:
- The USB hard drive is formated with a mountable file system.
- The USB hard drive has more capacity available than all the capacity of
the laptop hard drive.
- The USB hard drive is now mounted at /mnt/usbdrive.
- The laptop hard drive is /dev/hda.
Adjust the following commands to match your actual setup.

4. In a console or terminal issue the following command as root:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/usbdrive/hdabackup.bin bs=512

This command will copy the laptop hard drive starting at block 0 all the
way to the end, to a file called 'hdabackup.bin' in the root directory of
the USB drive.  It will probably go faster if you use a larger value for
block size (bs=) but always use multiples of 512 for the value.  512 is
the safest value to use.

5. The command will *not* provide feedback or a progress meter or
anything.  It can be safely stopped with a Ctl-C but the destination file
will be incomplete, obviously.

6. When complete you will get a print of the number of 'records' ie.
blocks transferred.

Restoring is simply booting to the same environment and reversing the
command by swapping the 'if=' and 'of=' (input file, output file)
specifications.

Important: This will backup all the laptop harddrive, including MBR,
partitions and blank space.  The restore will restore it all, wiping out
anything you newly placed on the hard drive.

There are other more elegant solutions, I'm sure, but this proceedure has
worked for me in the past.  Sometimes bulk is good!

Alan



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