Creating clone of a HDD including boot partition

[Giorgos Keramidas]

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.