Creating an Image

Heya.
I am searching for a way to create a complete image of a harddisk, together with the whole partition table and the master boot record. The harddrive got one Linux (running SuSE Linux 7.2) partition...a few other GB are not partitioned.

That might sound totally easy but I have searched a lot of pages and tried a lot of tools and couldn't get it to work. The whole process is relatively time-sensitive, so I cannot use the "dd" command because I don't have about 6 hours to wait for it to be completed.

1.6 GB of the 8 GB Linux Partition are in use...so a fast image solution where it only copies the used space would be the best.
12 GB are not partitioned (it's a 20 GB Harddrive).

Restoring the image should work on a totally unpartitioned raw-metal harddrive ... so just plug the image Harddisk in...boot from CD or a disk and run the image program.

I also tried a lot of Windows-based programs like Norton Ghost 2003 and Drive Image 2003 but all of them messed up the master boot record and the whole linux installation.

Either creating Image CDs (multiple ones most likely) or plugging the image Harddrive onto the secondary IDE is possible.

Hope one of you can help me out on that one.

Thanks,
Tom

Well, if it isn't absolutely crucial that the storage format is identical to the image of the hard drive, then tar will do just fine.

If not, then the only (free) tool I know of that will do hard drive imaging is dd. However, you can specify how much it is to copy using the count= option. Something like:

dd if=/dev/hda of=hd-image bs=1024 count=2097152

That should copy 2GB, I think.

Thanks Strike. I already tried with dd but didn't know that I can specify the size with count