Ok, I have been nagged enough to post my first question here.

Info: Please scroll down to see my present info catagorized.

Problem: I am trying to use DD to make a backup image of a drive used in a piece of test equipment.
I have been bouncing around between my purchased Acronis, Symantic crippled Ghost etc, and I can use them but prefer open source solution.

Tried g4l today and everything seemed great till I tried to restore the split 2g files it created to a test drive. It is confusing, when selecting drives it ends up calling both drives targets etc. then it says you have to unmount drive blahblah, i used utilities that did that but many more problems, so I drop g4l to perfect my dd quest.

So, tonight's trial after dropping g4l in favor of dd:
made destination drive hdc1 readable from knoppix gui, gave permissions to group and user.
Unmounted drives using knoppix gui.
opened terminal typed su and got root prompt.
dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip -9 -c | split -b 600m - /mnt/sda1/hdtv1.img.gz

Then I have problem, says "no space left on device" i am using 8 gigs or so of plain gzip files from g4l trials on the sda1, a separate drive just for archive files. I have 130 gigs free supposidly. Hmnn, I formatted this in fat32 with a windows98se floppy. It said 8 gigs or so when partitioning, but it shows 130+ gigs whenever I access it from xp or knoppix.
NOTE: at present xp has not seen this drive, i started from scratch, and did fdisk again.
I have same probs going to a 250 gig drive on the ide cable that i jumpered to 32 gig, no space.

ANOTHER error I got yesterday, split: too many arguments.

I've used google, --help man...HELLLP MEEEE he said to the spider.


Info:

I have successfully used dd to clone to a spare drive, and it boots...forgot what or if I did need to copy xfer mbr to new drive, but i know that concept.

I can use knoppix 4.0x cdr to use dd and I can see all my ide, sata drives ok, set permissions, release from read only oe unmount etc.

machine is amd 2.8 and a year old or so MB.
USB external dvd burner drive boots ok, knoppix sees and uses everything.

I know bs= and noerror,sync stuff, this just worked tonight. To save, stillcan't restore..

update:
dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip -9 -c | split -b 600m - /mnt/sda1/hdtv1.img.gz

this made a bunch of 600meg files to the drive

now trying to restore work in process

update restore crashed, i was trying to restore to another fat32 partitioned drive hdc1 with stuff on it. It went on for a half hour, then said no room. I thought it would dd and clone own partitions etc. guess i'll try tomorrow with empty partitions.

could you repeat the question?.......

Seriously, a long discourse like this is very hard to follow and will simply decrease the probablity of getting an answer. I, for one, cannot grasp the problem quickly enough to be able to help you.

See above for last nights wrestling with DD and basic Linux stuff.

Question now, I believe I have a hard drive backed up in 600m chunks (for possible cd/dvd storage). edit: I was succesfull in copying to another drive and back in 600M chunks. I can not boot the restored drive however. I tried the copying of the MBR file, 512 block, but still won't boot.
Edit: I found Awsomemachines dd thread.