backing up a whole hard disk

[mgorse at mgorse.dhs.org (Mike Gorse)]

Hi all,

I'm thinking about having another go at installing Linux on my laptop, but 
I am a bit paranoid because I made XP unbootable the last time I attempted 
this (December '03).  I suspect I ran into the problem with parted not 
understanding the new method that the 2.6 kernel uses to indicate disk 
geometry, but I'm not sure.  Or maybe I damaged XP by putting lilo in the 
MBR.  Anyway, I would like to back up my whole drive in case something 
goes wrong and am thinking about setting up my desktop to export an 
NFS-mountable directory that could hold a backup of the laptop's hard disk 
and running something like the following on the laptop:

bzip2 </dev/hda >/mnt/backup/ci-backup.bz2

I assume that this would allow me to restore the drive exactly as it was 
if I screw things up again, but can anyone comment as to whether or not it 
will do what I think it will do?

Thanks in advance,

-- Michael Gorse / AIM:linvortex / http://mgorse.home.dhs.org --