Creating and restoring image backups

[Dan Farrell]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2009 12:01:37 -0500
J Bickhard <jbickhard at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have a computer running Windows XP home edition, and have been
> trying (rather unsucessfully) to create a full-image backup of the
> 80GB harddrive onto my USB seagate 350(?) GB external hard drive. My
> question is this: is there a way, with the Ubuntu boot disk, to make
> this backup without installing Ubuntu on the computer in question.

The easiest way is to use dd.  

dd if=/dev/windows-disk of=/mnt/big-disk/windows-disk.img 

that should do it.  or

dd if=/dev/windows-disk of=/mnt/big-disk/windows-disk.img &
while(killall -USR1 dd) do sleep 2; done;

then switch back to dd's terminal, if you want to see your progress.  

You can put the image back the same way, except switch the if and of
artuments for dd.