backup images of NTFS drives

jason2 · 10-08-2004, 10:50 PM

I need to make a backup image of an NTFS boot drive (MBR, system and supporting files with registry)

can some one recomend a method and program to do this.

unreal128 · 07-21-2006, 06:23 PM

You can "dd" to make a byte-by-byte copy of the entire drive. For example, if the NTFS drive is on /dev/hda1 and you want it to be an image file, just type in...

Code:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/tmp/ntfs-drive.iso

...and to restore, type...

Code:

dd if=/tmp/ntfs-drive.iso of=/dev/hda1

In the first example, you can make of=/dev/hdb1 to copy it to a secondary drive or any dev resource file you choose.

Heads up though, this will take a long time since it is copying the drive and if you set "of=" to a filename, the file will be as big as the size of the drive. You can compress the file though once "dd" is complete.