Creating clone of a HDD including boot partition

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:57:33 +0100, bsd <bsd at todoo.biz> wrote:
> Le 15 déc. 2010 à 16:45, Giorgos Keramidas a écrit :
>> On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:11:45 +0100, bsd <bsd at todoo.biz> wrote:
>>> Is there a way to dd to a file to create an iso image and then restore
>>> (still using dd from this image).  I only have one IDE <--> USB cable
>>> so this is the reason why It'd more simple for me to create an iso
>>> image of the disk and then restore.
>>>
>>> Using dump won't be very useful because I won't be able to get the
>>> first 63 segments where boot info are written, I need something of
>>> lower level (obviously dd will be my friend).
>>>
>>> Thanks everyone. I'll try to post the line code once I got It up and
>>> running.
>>
>> No dd(1) cannot do that.
>>
>> What you _can_ do is boot into single-user mode, and then use mkisofs
>> with burncd or growisofs from dvd+rw-tools to burn an image while still
>> in single-user mode.  The only user mode process is your root shell at
>> that point, so you can be relatively sure there are no major changes
>> happening somewhere at the filesystem while you are still dumping it to
>> a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM disk.
>
> Just to be precise, I am not trying to do an ISO image of a running
> root FS, but of a USB attached disk.

Then it's much easier.  Just mount the disk as read-only and use
growisofs to dump its contents to a CD-ROM or DVD disk :)