[PLUG] Backing up a HD using dd

[cms <cshanahan@comcast.net>]

Hello all,

Back to the technical help stuff...

I have a--very nice--Toshiba laptop that I dual-boot WinXP and SuSE 9.1. I'm
trying to backup the Linux partitions (five of them) from the machine's HD to
an external firewire HD using dd so I can reinstall WinXP. Like many people, I
still have occasion to use WinXP for work and school <sigh> and I only have
the install CDs provided by Toshiba; in other words, I do not have an actual
WinXP CD. This process would be very easy if I were able to use Knoppix with
this machine, however, Knoppix will not run well enough to copy the five
partitions. Knoppix boots well enough but doesn't handle acpi/apm correctly so
the machine heats up during the copy process and eventually just crashes. I
have some other bootable CDs that I could use but I'm stuck on mount issues.
For example, I tried the F.I.R.E. CD (http://fire.dmzs.com/) and although its
dated, the CD booted nicely and ran well without acpi/apm issues. Trouble is,
it does not use ramdisk like Knoppix does so I'm not able to mount an external
device to copy my data to, an external device such as a firewire HD.

Is there another way to copy the data--as in dd--from the five partitions? I
wanted to use dd to copy the partitions to external media. Is there another
way to mount external media using a bootable CD so I can copy data to it?
Any suggestions?

As always, I value this list tremendously, despite some of the arguments:/

TIA for all suggestions.

Chris/CMS
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