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I need to make a (preferably) mountable image of an 80GB Hdd, and store it on another hard drive. Is there some way that I can do this without losing data?

Thanks for the answers I've received so far. The system in question cannot be used right now due to a problem with the power button :( [ugh!], but the information will really be useful =)! Thanks to all who answered so far, if anyone else wants to give me some tips I'll leave this open for a bit, as I still have not yet been able to clone the drive.

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possible duplicate of What software can be used to create a restorable drive image? – dv3500ea Nov 2 '10 at 22:51
to override the failing power button,just short the pins that connects the 2 power button wires with a screwdriver or something,but just those two don't touch more that those two at one time! – marc-andre benoit Feb 12 '11 at 5:10
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5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Use dd (replace sda1 with the partition you want to save):

sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of = /home/user/backup.img

will make a mountable image of a partition.
Just be aware that this could take a while, and the image will have the size of the partition, not the files on it. In your case this would be 80GB. If you compress the image it should be about the size of the used space of your hdd.

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of=/home/user/ isn't right. maybe /home/user/sda1.img – Li Lo Nov 3 '10 at 19:28
You're right! thx – sBlatt Nov 3 '10 at 22:07
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up vote 4 down vote

imaging through LAN

on the backup machine run:

nc -l -p 12345 | dd of=mybackup.img

on source machine run:

dd if=/dev/sda | nc server2 12345

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pretty interesting way to do it ^^! I'm currently trying to get the system to turn back on lol (stupid power button)!!!!!!!!! – Roland Taylor Nov 4 '10 at 0:48
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up vote 3 down vote

Remastersys is a program that can create backups of your entire hard drive and then save it to a LiveCD, for example. You can also use it to create a custom Ubuntu distribution. It has a CLI and a GUI, so take your pick. In the GUI, choose the first option, Backup.

Remastersys

To install it,open Software center Then Edit -> Software Sources -> Other software (Tab) and click add and paste

deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository karmic/

Now close the software sources window and wait for repos to be refreshed and install remastersys.

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Oops.. It seems that that reopsity needs to be "karmic" – Peter.O Nov 3 '10 at 6:31
Hi Lyrositor. Can you update this to use relinux instead of remastersys? – Roland Taylor Oct 18 '11 at 11:03
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up vote 2 down vote

My preferred method is to use a CloneZilla live CD. Download the .iso, burn it to disk with Brasero, put it into the machine you want to image, reboot, attach the destination drive, and follow the prompts. Be cautious when using dd, it's a very low level tool and mistakes can destroy data easily. If you want to make a byte-for-byte copy of an image, select CloneZilla's partition-to-partition option.

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up vote 1 down vote

This method isn't exactly graphical, but the article is pretty in depth with screenshots.

All tools are pre-installed by default in Ubuntu

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19446/make-a-drive-image-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd/

The resulting file with be a .IMG, which is easy enough to open in a variety of applications.

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