Hi everyone-

I want to create a bootable image of my current system which I can use as a 'recovery cd' of sorts should anything ever go drastically wrong (ie: hard drive dying). Since my home directory is already backed up on a separate drive, I don't need to worry about that, just every other directory.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any posts on LQ or on Google itself directly dealing with this issue.

I know many would argue just use a fresh install of Ubuntu, but I have my desktop customized in just the way I like, and if crisis strikes I would like to be able to just pop a disc in and have everything back to normal within an hour or so.

How about Mondo Rescue?

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/creating-c...mastersys.html

or you can backup your system with partimage.

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partimage

I don't know how to do exactly what you want, but I take backup images of the system partition with dd - see here:
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/ddcommand.htm

This achieves basically the same result, although you still need a separate Live CD to restore the image should you ever have to use it in anger.

http://aptoncd.sourceforge.net/

is another option. Although, as another poster suggested, remastersys seems to be more prevalent.

Sorry for my delayed reply everyone,

I got a backup image going on with partimage no problem.