I currently have a Compaq Armada e500 laptop running at 800mhz. I plan on buying a new laptop in the near future. I am extremely happy with my debian instalation including all my settings, files, installed programs, etc.. When i get the new laptop, i want to copy the exact disk image over from the old laptop to the new one, bit for bit (an exact replica) and start from there. This is what I am thinking...

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=~/mnt/MIKE/S/diskimage.iso

that command would make an image of my current working partition to another computer on my network...then when i get the new laptop, i would boot up a live linux cd and run:

dd if=~/mnt/MIKE/S/diskimage.iso of=/dev/hda2

(assumming the partitions are set up in advance and hda1 is the swap partition...)

Does anyone see any major problems with this?
Does anyone have any other suggestions?

I really just want some input about this. Thanks a lot.

~fatrandy13

as long as the partitions are identical that should be fine. note that as the entire file is a filesystem, the size of the resultant filesystem will be exactly the same size. it will not grow to fill a larger partition, but in reality you could then use resize2fs to enlarge it again afterwards, asssuming it's an ext2 / ext3 filesystem. don't forget the MBR too...

one point... it's not as iso file, as it doesn't contain an iso9660 standard file system... better off just calling it a .img or nothing at all.. how's that for picky?!

ok thanks for the input, i realize some amount of work will have to go into this after the image is made... i'll take note of resize2fs.
thanks