My mom wants me to make a backup of her entire Windows partiton on an external hard drive, only thing is I don't have a copy of Norton Ghost to make a ghost image with so I have a question. I can't just copy and paste over it using Windows because if it's running it tells me that they are protected system files and blah blah blah. Anyway, I've got a small LAN set up between her computer and my laptop (laptop is running Windows XP), and I've got her computer booted from my Knoppix LiveCD right now. I'm going to mount hda1 (Windows partition) and archive it in a folder on the external hard drive which is connected to my laptop (laptop is not restarting and I want the hard drive to be constantly available through the operation so I can get data off it any time I need to) and I've got the external shared and mounted through Samba on her computer. If I put this archive file on the external hard drive and in the case of a future crash again boot from Knoppix, could I delete the files from her hard drive and extract the archive in their place and have it work exactly like it does today? I would think that I would not be restricted by any of Windows' permissions because it wouldn't be running and I'd be using Knoppix. Does anybody know if this would work? If not then do you know how I could make it work?

I'll admit I've never tried it, but i can't see a good reason that that wouldn't work. You'll probably benefit a lot by filtering the image through gzip before sending it to the samba disk, as you should compress a lot of free space out of it etc...

so from your knoppix environment, assuming that all of the drive is wanted and there is only one and the mounted share is /mnt/samba then...

you may want to download BartPE

It is also good for this, and if you get a windows/dos imaging program at some point (like Ghost) it can be built into it.

PE is a bootable windoze on a CD, more or less. You just need a real XP CD (SP1+) to build from