[plug] backing up and restoring hard drive image

[Gregory Orange]

Jason wrote:
> the hard drive in my laptop has decided to die (this is the laptop's second hard drive - the first failed in a similar fashion) and I need to return 
> the hard drive for warranty purposes, but won't get a new drive until they confirm the hard drive is b0rked.
> 
> I want to dd the hard drive to create a backup image and store that on another machine, then, once I get the new hard drive, restore that image so 
> the computer won't realise anything has happened.
> 
> can anyone recommend a distro that I can boot from a cd which will allow me to ftp the backup image into some form of temporary FS, either on 
> the drive or in memory, which I can then restore using dd?

Have you got hard drive space on a networked machine somewhere?

For dd images I just boot into a gentoo-minimal CD, and run this:

dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda | ssh -c blowfish user at server dd bs=1M 
of=/path/to/file.dd

Using blowfish makes it run faster. Then in reverse onto the new drive:

ssh -c blowfish user at server dd bs=1M if=/path/to/file.dd | dd bs=1M 
of=/dev/hda


Greg.