Using dd

# dd --help

For more options check dd man page

Using dd you can create backups of an entire harddisk or just a parts of it. This is also usefull to quickly copy installations to similar machines. It will only work on disks that are exactly the same in disk geometry, meaning they have to the same model from the same brand.



Full hard disk copy:

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy
dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image
dd if=/dev/hdx | gzip > /path/to/image.gz

Hdx could be hda, hdb etc. In the second example gzip is used to compress the image if it is really just a backup.



Restore Backup of hard disk copy:

dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx

gzip -dc /path/to/image.gz | dd of=/dev/hdx



Master Boot Record (MBR) backup:

In order to backup only the first few bytes containing the MBR and the partition table you can use dd as well.

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image count=1 bs=512



MBR restore:

dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx

Add "count=1 bs=446" to exclude the partition table from being written to disk. You can manually restore the table.

Hope this will do the trick for you.

Thank you jazzjack. I'll try this and get back to you. If it is not necessary to copy deleted files, is cp better?

I used cp and the job wasn't as hard as I thought. Tusind tak jazzjack for being there. You're an angel. Can I assign the points to you from here?

I'm trying something by turning off the Abonner maybe I can send you the points.

Guess it's the same problem. Just worte comments, no answers.Well here is an answer.