[QCLUG] Drive Imaging.

[Mark Riedesel]

You could use dd to just do a backup of the mbr/partition table (first
512 bytes)

dd if=/dev/sda of=backup_mbr.img bs=512 count=1

then writing it back is as simple as swapping the if= and of= values.

then just tar up the partitions.. In the past I've used tar with
permission preservation enabled (-p) for entire root partitions, and
they worked fine after unpacking them to an empty partition later on.

tar -czvf partition.tar.gz /dev/sda1

Just some ideas.



Brandon Griffis wrote:
> Just wondering what people out there use for creating hard disk images? 
> I'm looking to take an image of a locally connected (USB) hard drive
> including the MBR that's formatted as FAT16.  (it's running DOS 6.2)
> 
> Many years ago I used Ghost, but it seems that the newer versions of
> Ghost require the backup go across a network connection (there is no
> option to create an image of a locally connected HD, I even asked
> Symantec support about it). 
> 
> I've come across PartImage for Linux that supports all the major FS
> formats, but it only takes an image of a partition, there's no way to
> simply image the entire drive.  It also has an option in the program
> that says "Restore an MBR from the imagefile", but there is no
> discussion about that option in the documentation or much anywhere I
> could find online.  Everything I could find about PartImage seemed to
> claim that you had to use dd and sfdisk to get the MBR and partition
> info in addition to getting the image from PartImage.  Having to use
> three programs seems a bit overkill to me for simply wanting to get a
> drive image backed up.
> 
> dd would do the job, but the HD is 32GB and I know dd will read every
> bit (not just the used ones) so it would take a very long time and take
> up a lot of space when the OS and program on the drive only uses a few
> hundred meg.
> 
> If anybody has experience with PartImage and can verify the "Restore an
> MBR from the imagefile" option works, or if anybody knows of another
> free drive image utility I would greatly appreciate hearing about it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Gamble