Completely copy hard drive...
 

Is there a way to burn an image of your hard drive and keep incase you crah your system. What I would like to be able to do is make a copy and load it into a new drive and keep it as a spare...

Is this possible...
And...
Is it possible to do this by slaving a linux drive to a windows dirve, in order to burn the files from windows...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=347204 for the first one and the second one depends on which filesystem you use on you Linux installation.

I am very new to Linux... How do I know which filesystem I have?

Use next command:
dmesg | grep hd
or
dmesg | grep sd
to detect your hard disk drives devices.
For example original hard drive is /dev/hdc

You can check disk content:
mount /dev/hdc /mnt
ls /mnt
(do not forget to umount /mnt)

To make backup:
dd if=/dev/hdc of=/place/to/save/backup.iso bs=512k

To restore backup
dd if=/place/to/save/backup.iso of=/dev/hdc bs=512k

where
if - input file
of - output file
bs - block size