Re: Backing up an entire hard drive
On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 03:02:31PM +0300, Micha wrote:
> I need to wipe my hardrive for some repair and I want to back it up. I would
> prefer to just backup the debian partition and not the entire harddrive. Is it
> possible to do either with dd?
yes to both
> seems like it should work for the entire drive,
> would it work for a single partition if I restore previous partition sizes?
yes. A backup of the mbr and the parition table is possible with
dd if=/dev/hda of=$FILE bs=512 count=1
> How do I backup my active drive/root partition? do I need a live cd or is it
> possible to do from a running system?
when the mounted partitions are mounted read only it is reasonably
possible.
It is possible to do a dd even of a read-write mounted partition, but
the probability of a corrupted copied filesystem (i.e. one which does
not suvive well to a fsck) is hight (only when there is really NO write
activity there is reasonable hope that a fsck will restore the copied
filesystem in the wanted state)
--
Chi usa software non libero avvelena anche te. Digli di smettere.
Informatica=arsenico: minime dosi in rari casi patologici, altrimenti letale.
Informatica=bomba: intelligente solo per gli stupidi che ci credono.
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