Easy and economical way to image your drive

i found a great way to make a bit for bit image of a harddrive, for backup purposes

level of difficulty(medium-advanced)

i have tested this method and it worked

what you need to buy (no paid software req'd)

an external HD with at least as much space as your internal HD that you want to make a copy of

a CD-R to put knoppix linux on

what to do

1. download a copy of knoppix linux
as of nov 20, 2007 here is the most recent version in english
*this is a live CD, meaning you just boot from CD, your HD is not used at all by it)
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/knoppix/KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso

2. burn the iso to a CD-R ; have your external HD plugged in.

3. boot from the CD-R, when the graphical screen comes up boot using 'knoppix noswap' to be absolutely sure nothing gets written to your internal HD. when u boot into knoppix make sure that u dont click any icons on the desktop as it could possibly mount a drive

4. open a terminal windows and run the 'sudo qtparted' command; determine the source device to be copied from, your internal HD, and the destination to be copied to, the external HD

5. run this command
making 100% sure that the src and dest are correct, otherwise you could overwrite your working HD with the contents of the external and lose all data

i cannot reiterate enough, 'if' is the source to be copied from, 'of' is the destination to be copied to. dont get this part backwards

sudo dd bs=128K if=/dev/sourcehere of=/dev/desthere

6. the two drives should now be identical bit for bit



i hope this is helpful to someone - note that this method worked for me perfectly, and i am not a linux genius, but i am pretty sure this method should work reliably.

if you decide to try this out and need help, send me a PM

side note here as I am also teaching myself my way into that stuff: If you have an IDE disk, your "if" will be something along /dev/hda1", where hda, hdb, hdc means first, second, third physical disk in your pc, and hda1, hda2, hda3 meand partition 1, 2, 3, if you were to backup only a partition.
If you have a SATA disk, same rules apply except hda becomes sda and so forth.
Not sure about USB media, though.