copying Fedora Core 10 to an external drive
 

I am thinking about using aida to nuke my drive and then I'll re-partition it with gparted. I don't want to lose my 15 GB installation of Fedora Core 10 in the process and have an external 80 GB drive. How could I back up Fedora to this drive with the intention of copying it back to my internal drive?

The simplest way is to use dd to image the F10 partition and to move the image back afterwards.

An alternative is to do a standard system backup using any backup package that works and a restore afterwards. (I'm looking for a package that doesn't "barf" when it hits the .gvfs "pseudo" directory that holds the GNOME "Virtual File System." Since stat can't be run on the directory, some backup systems (e.g., tar from the "backup_manager" scripts) can't even skip .gvfs/.)

Another alternative is to do a selective backup of things you need to keep (mostly found in /home) followed by a fresh install of F11 on the re-partitioned drive. (Since support for F10 will be terminated about a month after F12 is released in six to eight months.)

Linuxhippy, did the fedora iso install work out or no?