Knoppix may be using the swap partition on your hard drive.  If that is included in the image created using dd, the md5sum will certainly change. 

In addition, Knoppix CAN be set up to save various information in a file on persistent storage so as to retain same between live boots.  While I doubt you have done this and so it should not be the reason for your situation, it seemed appropriate to point this out.

On 4/6/07, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz > wrote:
Well, what a pickle I have created!

I believe this method works, except I can't get md5sum to generate a reliable
checksum for the hda drive on my laptop. I thought knoppix didn't touch the
local drive, but each time I run

md5sum /dev/hda

I get a different result. I assume the hard drive is changing somehow, even
though I am running knoppix off the cdrom, and knoppix says it is not
mounted.

So, I will look for another way to do this. Sigh.

Mark

On Thursday 05 April 2007 15:51, George Toft wrote:
> Method 1:
> 1.  Boot a knoppix cd
> 2.  Open a root terminal window and issue this command:
> dd if=/dev/hda | ssh user@someremotehost "> /path/to/file/backup.img"
>
>
> Method 2:
> Trinity - clone NTFS filesystems over the network
> http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12
>
>
>
> Keep in mind you will be limited by your network or disk drive.
> Experience has shown this takes a really long time for a large drive.
> If you want to watch the progress:
> 1.  Log into someremotebox and issue this command:
> watch "ls -lh /path/to/file/*"
>
>
>
> To copy the image from the remote box:
> ssh user@someremotehost "cat /path/to/file/backup.img" | dd of=/dev/hda
>
>
>
>
> George Toft, CISSP, MSIS
> 623-203-1760
>
> Mark Phillips wrote:
> > I have a laptop that dual boots Windows and Debian. I need to make a
> > complete backup of the entire drive. I have another Windows XP machine on
> > my network (or another Debian machine) with some extra disk space, so I
> > would like to create an image of the disk drive and store it there. I
> > then want to restore it later. How do I do that?
> >
> > I have been googling around for "hard drive backup" and "partition
> > backup". I found a few options, tested them on the Window 200 partition,
> > and they don't seem to be able to do the job. One problem I have is that
> > Windows 2000 does not see the Linux partition and Debian does not see the
> > Windows 2000 partition. Based on what I read, I should unmount the drive
> > I am copying - is this true?
> >
> > I am not enough of a Linux guru to figure out how to use dd across the
> > network. Can I run dd on the system I am imaging?
> >
> > Can I do this with a knoppix CD? Is there a howto somewhere? I couldn't
> > find it.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Mark
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