Simple hard drive imaging disc?

[board2death986]

Just wondering what you guys would recommend. I have a redundant drive I want to use as a backup (think of raid 1, but the alternate drive is disabled until needed). I want to copy the OS drive without taking it out of the machine as my MicroATX rig is a bit cluttered at the moment. Is there a good piece of software anyone would recommend that I could burn to a disc and run on the machine itself?

 

[olavgg]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

 

[drescherjm]

dd or ddrescue

That's what I use most for this purpose at home, at work and for clients. If you have even a limited understanding of linux these are powerful tools that work reliably when other tools fail. The reason for this is they do the simplest thing. They just make a bit for bit copy of one device to a second (same size or larger) without caring what they are copying. As a result the user must be sure before they enter the command to get the source and destination correct. Neither utility will care if you reversed these and overwrote your data disk with what was on the blank disk you are trying to copy to.

There are 3 programs I use to verify I have the source and destination correct.

fdisk -l /dev/sd?

will show you the partition table of all hard drives

The following utilities can show you the serial # of the drives.

hdparm -I /dev/sdX

or

smartctl --all /dev/sdX

where X = the device you want to look at. Get that from the fdisk command.

ddrescue adds "rescue" to dd which it will work around unreadable sectors.

If you are not comfortable in using a linux livecd (like sysrescuecd, partedmagic, or even ubuntu ) clonezilla and Acronis True Image have a more user friendly interface in that you do not have to type what you want you can just click. These check the filesystems so it is more likely that these will fail to copy your data especially if it is unclean (meaning you did not shutdown cleanly) or if the hard drive has bad or unreadable sectors. When I took this route in the past they used to tell you to run checkdsk in windows to fix your problem before running the utility. I am not sure if they require that in their current versions. I have used both of these 1 time in 2011 with dd / ddrescue > 20 times..

In windows 7 there is also a feature of the OS backup software to create an image of the current os. I am not sure of what versions allow this but I remember several users of this forum mentioning success with this.

 

[danswartz]

clonezilla is good.