making an image of my drive
 

hi,

i have a couple of questions to ask today i hope they don't sound too stupid :) :

i would like to make an image of my hdd ( hda1 to be more Specific )
dd seems to be a good option, however is it possible to only take the information from the disk, i.e. no partition information, and no free space information, just the data?

if this possible to do with dd or would you recommend something else?

also:

how well would a partition/drive image compress? i.e. if i had a one gig partition would it squish down?

and:

how easy would it be to tell if a drive's contents has changed? could i use md5sum on the partition its self?


thanks
antken

If you use partimage it will only copy the data and therefore reduce the size.

I would think that looking at the usage of the drive would probbaly be accurate enough to see if the contents have changed but it depends on your need.