And be careful with "dd" aka disk distroyer. Make double sure of your /dev/sd??
or you might end with: see aka.
dd carries no warning!
I usually use something like live Clonzilla or Parted Magic usually. I am usually pretty careful for a Knuckle Dragging Neanderthal Tattooed Linux using Harley rider who does not make his living working IT but instead make my money tuning and building and repairing Motorcycles in my own building/shop/Quonset Hut steel Building.
# blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="PQSERVICE" UUID="84C0247FC0247996" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="SYSTEM RESERVED" UUID="9C2425202424FF40" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda3: LABEL="Acer" UUID="6AC2CA02C2C9D28D" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="26a54718-3581-4c8b-958a-a03d4ce2b96f" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda7: UUID="a6ae8d53-ff84-420d-93f2-820aeee3722a" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda6: UUID="9b2b59c3-470f-4a0f-82d0-9c933bc0ca4a" TYPE="ext4"
This latop is for tuning bikes. Hence the Windows 7 on the drive. If I decided to use just dd to create a backup or whatever and I have used PUDD in Puppy to clone a netbook 8gig internal XP SSD drive to external 8 gig Camera SD flash drive. Anyways. It would go something like this. Me being a bull in a china cabinet and all.
1. Boot up your Live cd or dvd of your choice
2. Open a terminal window on the Desktop/Window Manager.
3. su into root. Then password.
4. Plug in some external drive. Do not mount that sucker yet. If Automounted. Unmount that Puppy.
5. use fdisk or blkid to get /dev/sdx number so no mistakes are made in the next steps.
6. Lets say that the external drive was shown as a folder as /media/disk as that is the usual/norm
dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -c >/media/disk/system-image.gz
The above should copy,compress,stuff like the bootloader/partitions/and partition tables of your whole hardrive sda. Including Windows if dualbooting. So make sure you use a good size external drive before doing this. I have a 1 TB drive for stuff like this.
To unzip
gunzip -c /media/disk/system-image.gz | dd of=/dev/sda
