Topic: Laptop, External HD, image?

[Steve]

My sister laptop needs to go to hp for a new motherboard. We all know they will format it while they have it, regardless of my instructions, so she needs her stuff backed up. Normally i would just dump the info onto my external, no biggy quick and easy. BUT shes very very stuck on having it the same as it is now, as it "took her forever to get it the way i want it".

So basically i am thinking of creating an image, and when it comes back just restoring that image and viola. But i have always done this on desktops and to a secondary drive. I am needing to do this one to my external. Any ideas?

[Dumah]

Knoppix. It'll load up in live mode without writing to the disk. Then you load up an external drive and use the "dd" command to copy the drive to an image file

[Steve]

perfect, thnx. Can i use the dd command to put the image into a specific folder? I keep all my music, files, etc on the external so it cant have free run of th whole drive.

[Dumah]

Save it as an ISO file

[Steve]

awsome, ty

[Dumah]

Here's another cool thing. Strangely, I had to use "dd" last night to clone a drive onto a an external HD. I saved it as a file, then mounted that file with the standard unix "mount" command and I could browse it as if the disk was still there. Linux is stupidly good at some things...

[Steve]

good to know