Can anyone recommend the best way to make a bootable image of a system hard disk, with ext2 filesystems, meeting the following criteria:-
a) copying the MBR and all required partitions in a single pass, not one partition at a time.
b) able to put the image onto a non-formatted disk
c) preferably with the option to omit selected partition(s)
d) preferably able to resize partitions to suit a smaller or larger
destination disk

In the past I've used both 'dd' and PowerQuest Drive Image, and I'd welcome any comments about the following issues:-

'dd'
I used to use this on a 386 running SCO Sys V R3 but I'm not sure if the GNU 'dd' will do the same. Does anyone know if it can meet any of the above requirements? If so, any sample script would be welcome.

Drive Image
I've recently used both Drv Img 1 and Drv Img 2 to successfully image my Red Hat 7.2 sys disk. Both meet (a) to (c) above (although v1 doesn't actually show or allow deselection of higher partitions - above 8GB or 1024 cylinders?) but they will not resize
ext2 partitons, so the destination disk has to be at least as big as the source - most of my spare disks are smaller
Drv Img 5 is supposed to do faster "SmartSector"(TM) copying ie: of used sectors only, and is supposed to be able to resize ext2 partitions. However it also suggests converting the Extended partiton to type 'ExtendedX' (0f) which I'm worried about. Most of the discussion I've seen on the web about ExtendedX
has concerned PQ Partition Magic and OS/2. Apparantly IBM Boot Manager didn't recognize ExtendedX, does GRUB?
I did do an image without converting to ExtendedX but it wouldn't boot, complaining "NO OS". Is anyone using Drv Img 5 successfully?

Mondo-rescue will do all that you require. I use it to do full system backups and have used it to restore to bare metal after which I had a fully functioning system.

Thanks for your suggestion Aussie.

I've looked at the Mondo site but I'm not sure whether Mondo will do what I want which is a direct disk-to-disk image without going to CD?

If Mondo can only create an image file, then I can't imagine that its going to be suitable because I would have to have a whole big partition (not to be imaged) set aside for the intermediate file, or a 3rd disk! Plus it makes the operation longer - I really want to do it in one operation to save time and reduce the opportunity for human error to creep in and invalidate the backup.

Regards
Mike