backing up a whole hard disk

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 12:44:53 -0400
   From: Andrew Medico <a.medico at gmail.com>
   Cc: 

   On 5/11/05, Mike Gorse <mgorse at mgorse.dhs.org> wrote:
   > 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?

   It should work perfectly. The only potential issue with backing up
   hard drive images like that  is you might not be able to restore it to
   a disk of different geometry (think disaster-recovery situation), but
   putting it back on the original drive shouldn't be a problem.

I've backed up individual partitions that way.  As long as you restore
the dump onto a partition at least as large you shouldn't have any
grief.  Dumping an entire disk that way might cause geometry problems.