The documentation for the very good SysRescCD has changed, so I can’t find the standard “here’s how to back up a disk” using sfdisk and partimage anymore.
Luckily, it got saved here: www.hackadmin.com/2009/05/31/disk-imaging-with-partimage/.
For future reference, this is a good way to back up a disk.
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Boot the machine with the disk using SysRescCD.
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Mount a big NFS/CIFS drive.
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Copy the MBR:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/cifs/sda.mbr count=1 bs=512 -
Copy the partition table from the drive:
sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /cifs/sda.sfdisk -
Run partimage on each partition on the drive
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Finally, for good measure,
dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /cifs/sda.dd.gz
You can use kill -USR1 pid on the dd process id (not the gzip process id) to see progress.
Most of the restore is straightforward. sfdisk can take its output as input; partimage has restore built in. To decompress the gzip dd image, use:
gzip -dc /cifs/sda.dd.gz | dd of=/dev/sda
Incidentally, a good site for dd information is here: www.softpanorama.org/Tools/dd.shtml