How to backup and restore Red Hat installation
 

Hello all,

Im new to this kid of things as i never had to do backup and restore of entire linux installation so please go easy on me.

Here is the problem:

I have a computer with HDD that has dual boot to Windows XP and Red Hat.

The windows is totaly messed up and i need to reinstall the whole thing but shop that sold the PC made bad partitioning and now i have to do i all over again.

Windows partition and installation is not a problem since there is not much important data there so that is not the issue.

PROBLEM:
Red Hat installation and all of the data and programs on it are really important and i must save it all at all cost.

So, please if you can, tell me how can i backup or clone or make image or do something similar to Red Hat installation so i can restore it back to another HDD when i do repartitioning of HDD drive ?

Further more, i would like to know if it is possible that i do a backup and restore it to some Virtual Machine software like Virtual PC or VMWare or similar so i dont have to make dual boots ?

I must point out that it is of outmost importance to have all data and programs from Red Hat saved and restored and that it MUST work since it is really important.

Best option for me would be some Virtual Machine option since that would ensure i have it secure on a DVDs and can backup everything easy whenever i want to.

Edit:
Please note that i dont know root password for this installation and that this installation is not set up for internet (computer uses ADSL modem connected to USB port).

I found that Acronis backup tool will may ba able to do this, but have not tryed it. Can anyone please give some information on this ?

Thank you in advance.

I'm not too sure about the virtualization that you are talking about, but for backing up your data you may be able to boot from a live CD with something like Knoppix and copy your data to an external hard drive, or maybe even set your current HD as a slave on another system and copy the data from there.