tarring a dd stream
 

I would like to make a backup of my hard drive /dev/hda1 using dd so all the boot blocks etc get saved. I need to make this into a tar file (tar.bz2 if I could) I figured out how I can make dd output all the stuff inputed dd if=/dev/hda1 this will output everything to the screen. How can I get tar to capture this? And when I want to restore I need to untar to dd if={stream} of=/dev/hda1. How can I do this?

--John

don't tar it, it won't benefit you at all, as it's already a single stream of data. instead jsut send it straight to bzip2:

dd if=/dev/hda | bzip2 blah.bz2 -

or something along those lines.