i found several ways to backup my hard drive, however, it seems the methods go beyond the scope of what i am trying to do. let's say i have a laptop that has under 3 gigs of data and i want to back it up to a dvd that i can boot from. what would be the easiest way to image the disk to a file that i can burn to a dvd so if the hard drive fails, i can replace the drive with another just like it and boot from the dvd to reinstall the image back to the hard drive?

There are quite a few ways although I haven't tried it. Google creating a live cd and that should get you a few ways to do what you want.

altho you have only asked one way....there are more than 5

1) create the image such as with www.partimage.org burn it to its own dvd....boot a live cd...to ram so you can remove the cd....stick in the dvd and while still in ram drive....use partimage that is a part of the live cd...to use the now mounted dvd to restore image from that to your intended new drive

2) create image....but remaster a live cd that has partimage on it.....so old drive image is copied to remastered dvd.....that right a live cd can be made a live dvd and restore image from that dvd to new drive.

3) use a live cd to create the partitions first....then if live cd is ram only...copy new inserted dvd image to new partition then restore image from that.....sounds messy.

4) you can buy very large usb sticks now a days that can take a 3G image. Use a live cd.

For all of them....use a live cd to put grub into mbr if you used partimage....or if you are going to create same size partitions...first partition image has a copy of mbr that you use to restore first

5) instead of partimage you could use dd.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ommand-362506/

RIP is a very small live cd that has instructions on how to remaster...that I have actually done and it works.....the only difference is I burnt to cd...but no reason why it won't work to dvd.

2) Seriously tho, (1) is best as I create so many images....I do not want to waste time do a remaster and reburn or using a dvdrw....so one live cd and dvdrws for the images is what I do.

awesome. thanks. never thought of using a live cd.