[KLUG Members] dd

[Adam Williams]

> I need to image the primary drive in a Win98 machine.  It has one
> drive and I prefer not to spend any extra money to do this.
> I have a Suse Live Eval (Thanks Stu) disk so I have access to "dd",
> which looks like it will do the trick.  
> 1. I will be starting the box with the Suse disk for my linux
> enviroment.
> 2. mounting a share from another networked Win98 box ( /OfficePC )
> 3. # dd if=/dev/hda of=/OfficePC/USimage
> 4. Breathe a sigh of relief because it worked. 
> My Q's are can I send my output file to a mounted share and is the
> command in line "3" correct.

To a "mounted share"?  You mean to a file across a network? Sure.

I'd modify the command a bit to be "dd if=/dev/hda{part#} of={file}
bs=512".  I'd only image the partition, not the whole drive, unless you
know your going to restore to the exact physical drive.  You also need
to copy the output of "fdisk -l" so you can recreate a partition of the
exact same size later.  The "bs=512" just makes the copy more efficient
by moving a bunch of bytes at a time.

But personally I use partimage - http://www.partimage.org/  it makes
alot of this easier, lets you create an image server, as well as
compressing images on the fly.