My friend recently got a laptop for his birthday, but the hard drive seems to be bad. He wants to keep all the data on the drive including the boot sector. Is there a program I can run from my Slackware 10.1 using kernel 2.6.3 that can create an exact copy of the drive. If the partition size is changed at a later date, will the image be of any use? Thanks.

The 'dd' command, check the man page.

You could use partimage from http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page. You should be able to run it from Slackware (are you connecting his drive to your PC?), or download the System Rescue CD from http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page, boot with it and image from there.

Changing partitions sizes will have an effect but you can restore to a larger partition.

I would use dd except I have had problems with this command. Even after using fdisk to calculate my exact disc size in bytes, I found extra bytes that were not reported by fdisk at the end of the partition. This scares me because I want to get absolutely everything.

Partition Image would be perfect except ntfs is expiremental. I have used the System Rescue CD before and it is an awsome utility. I would say a utility a linux user can't do without!

It looks like I'm stuck with dd then. Is there any way to check if I'm at the end of a partition? Is there a good way to find the last sector used by an ntfs partitioned hard drive?

Thanks for the help so far.

Use a tool designed for the job ntfsclone.

If you merely want a disk image (byte-for-byte) use "dd" - to a bigger disk to ensure no later issues.