Someone loaned me an--old--laptop for a few months (that hasn't been used for a couple years) which has a deprecated non-*nix on it. I doubt the loaner would want the system restored if I managed to install a secured linux on it, but just in case I'd like to make an image of it. The system has a P3, 512 MB RAM & 40 GB HDD, more precisely it's a Dell PP01L (Latitude C600). I haven't established yet if it can boot from USB, but it has a DVD player, a (tested) USB port and I have blank DVDs, an ext burner and ext HDD.

Which distribution and software would you recommend to live boot on the 512 MB RAM P3 to take an image from its HDD on a 4 TB ext HDD?

Thank you kindly

I'd go for Clonezilla. Text based UI and doesn't require much RAM.

The only thing I'd look into when you have something with that low RAM is that you may have to make a choice about compression method in order to stay within RAM limit. Also I'd recommend you run Memtest on it just to check the health of the RAM.

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Which commands would I need to run to do that? Please note I'm not much of a *nix user. If I have to also mount the ext HDD and setup some kind of temporary file, I'd be lost without examples.

Antix linux would be worth a try. Based on Debian non-systemd

I thought that required 1 GB RAM. Which software?

Which software?!

See this link for clonezilla. -->https://clonezilla.org/

Use this to create a restorable HD.

This link --> https://antixlinux.com/antix-19-b1-f...bit-available/

This link will help with Antix.

software...

Consider G4U also. Bootable floppies to send the file to some networked location.

If the device has a usb then you could send the image to that I'd think also.

Most of the cloning software has a learning curve.

The command line dd when booted to almost any minimal linux distro can save the hard drive image off to some resource.

G4U is basically dd with compression running on *BSD.

Tinycore and slitaz would boot to that as well as a number of modern distro's that still support older 32 bit.

I'm not expecting for someone to do it for me, but some examples would be nice.

Is that the go-to one or others are usually considered when facing a similar task?

Every member at LQ has their preference on backup/clones. No one choice suits all. My choice depends on the system and OS and what resources I have. Every distro usually has some feature baked in and always in package manager.

dd is a bit by bit copy of the entire storage so it kind of helps to have loader and not normally easy to copy using file by file. dd copies all the space even if unused. Some folks zero out unused space to make compression sort of negate the space. No compression means a 40G drive will take somewhere around that in a file.

Clonezilla tries to copy file by file if it knows the filesystem. If not it defaults to bit by bit. It saves a number of files that helps it return to original state. It too has an ability to clone over lan or deploy over lan.

If you want you can use Gparted to save a partition off but it won't be the entire drive.

There are many file by file copy programs. If you don't mind re-creating the loader or other unique areas then a file by file is pretty good.

The clonezilla site had examples at one time. Should still be there but web will show how to clone with it.

NOTE. dd is a very unforgiving command. You have to be very careful when using it.

dd with netcat even could be used. Linux commands can be piped to other programs is the example.

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The dd command form:When you boot linux off of a USB drive, it should discover your internal HDD and call it something like /dev/sda, or /dev/sdb, etc. That would be your if= "input file", another attached external HDD would get another name /dev/sda or /dev/sdb/ or other. Make sure you understand which is which, an fdisk -l will help with that.

sudo is to allow you to have root privileges when you do this command, because you will need them. If the Linux version console has # as a prompt, mostly likely you are already root, so you may not need sudo. Usually you will though.

bs=4M is to use block size of 4M, you don't have to, but sometimes it helps make the copy faster.

That will do it.

As far as finding a version of Linux to boot, web search, I've not tried to boot any modern Linux versions with that little memory in a while. Also may need to know if that machine is 32-bit, seems like it may be with that tiny of a HDD.

Clonezilla doesn't copy file by file. If it knows the filesystem, it copies just the parts with data on them.
It also copies the partition table and all the other low-level bits.

Restriction:- If you restore it to a disk, it must be at least as big as the source disk - 40GB in this case.

Knoppix cd is a choice to consider. I don't know what all the tools could be on it but it will have a terminal and dd command.