Possible Duplicate:
How to clone a hard drive to an image that I can open later?
This question stemed from my other question:
How do I make a bit copy of my internal hard drive to an external hard drive and check the disk for errors?
Possible Duplicate:
How to clone a hard drive to an image that I can open later?
This question stemed from my other question:
How do I make a bit copy of my internal hard drive to an external hard drive and check the disk for errors?
if your external harddrive is larger than your internal i would use
sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb logfile
note: sda is your source disk sdb is your destination drive (external). this will also overwrite any data on your external drive
you can install ddrescue via sudo apt-get install ddrescue
i prefer ddrescue over normal dd becasue it gives you a nice progress bar and it will log i/o errors
I regularly make complete hardrive copies using Clonezilla.
Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery.
I recommend downloading the live version and boot your computer from it then you can make a complete copy of the harddrive to and external drive or network drive. Clonezilla will also run checks if you wish during and after creating the copy.
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