backing up a whole hard disk

[Andrew Medico]

On 5/11/05, Mike Gorse <mgorse at mgorse.dhs.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm thinking about having another go at installing Linux on my laptop, but
> I am a bit paranoid because I made XP unbootable the last time I attempted
> this (December '03).  I suspect I ran into the problem with parted not
> understanding the new method that the 2.6 kernel uses to indicate disk
> geometry, but I'm not sure.  Or maybe I damaged XP by putting lilo in the
> MBR.  Anyway, I would like to back up my whole drive in case something
> goes wrong and am thinking about setting up my desktop to export an
> NFS-mountable directory that could hold a backup of the laptop's hard disk
> and running something like the following on the laptop:
> 
> bzip2 </dev/hda >/mnt/backup/ci-backup.bz2
> 
> I assume that this would allow me to restore the drive exactly as it was
> if I screw things up again, but can anyone comment as to whether or not it
> will do what I think it will do?

It should work perfectly. The only potential issue with backing up
hard drive images like that  is you might not be able to restore it to
a disk of different geometry (think disaster-recovery situation), but
putting it back on the original drive shouldn't be a problem.
-- 
Andrew Medico <a.medico at gmail.com>