^ good idea. this mite work: it will probably take a while; you mite need to be root (sudo).
tar: http://ss64.com/bash/tar.html


alternatively you can make a byte-for-byte replica of the disk image using disk duplicator: this is very destructive because it is overwriting the whole disk (all partitions as well as boot sector and partition table) although it can be modified to point at a specific partition.

1 members found this post helpful.

I deleted this post, as I had not seen the immediate post before this. I'm in LiveCD session and forgot to F5. Sorry.

schneidz

Thanks! I'm running the tar as I type. It's gotta take until dark, tonight, from the looks of the speed, but I'm so happy. And grateful for your help. It would have taken me all day to get half of those commands.

your welcome... clik on 'Did you find this post helpful?' to rep me up.

thanks,

To All To Whom These Presents Shall Come:

Thank you, Linux Community. The tar made a 31 gig file of the /home. And sent it to the external usb harddrive without problems. The /home uncompressed was 36 gig so I guess that's fair for the game. Meanwhile, on a clean reinstall of Natty Narwahl (ver. 11.04) to /sda1, the OS has been restored. I even have some passwords and similar I would not have expected to find still there on a clean re-install. I had to re-install the Brother printer driver and scanner driver, but that was easy enough.

Happy to see a success problem solved.