This is what I’d like to do:
I’d like to do a complete backup of my laptop, convert it to ISO, and then create a bootable flash drive with it. I’d like to be able to totally restore, or run (like in Live mode) the image.
Can this be done? If so, how so?
Thanks in advance!
I know this can be done, but I’m not totally sure how you would go about doing it. But first thing I would do is make sure your medium is big enough to hold an image of your hard disk. 
Not sure about the ISO part. That does not make sense to me.
What I would try is to install a new system to the device and then copy my home from the Disk to the USB.
This may not boot in other machines due to hardware differences!
What you need is a modified Live CD image since this is setup to detect the hardware. It would be modified to use a partition on the USB as the home and maintain the user base on a partition some where other then RAM disk.
Many people seem do be interested in such a setup. But to my knowledge there is nothing prebuilt to do this. Might be a interesting and worthwhile project.
If you have a media big enough you could try doing an exact image of your hard disk using dd from a live distro. It would be something along the lines of this.
To make image:
dd if=/dev/hds of=/file.img
To restore image:
dd if=/file.img of=/dev/hds
Where “/dev/hds” is the name of the hard disk to image, and “file.img” is the file to save it to. In reality it will probably look something kind of like this:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb/backup.img
and to restore:
dd if=/mnt/sdb/backup.img of=/dev/sda
Again though make sure you have enough space before trying this!
Initially I was going to do this on an 8gb thumb drive, now though, I have a 320GB USB drive I can use (got a new 500GB to replace it with).
So drive space isn’t an issue.
So I should also refine what I want to do:
What astonishes me is that there doesn’t seem to be an application or simplified set of scripts to already do this. The idea seems like a no brainer.
Thanks folks!
Hi
If you use dd it will create an image of the drive. Personally I would
just get another drive for the laptop the same, pull the old one and dd it back.
It will take some time to dd the data to and from the device, hence
quicker to get another drive.
The other option to look at in the future is building your image along
with any customizations using SUSE Studio (account creation is
required for an invite, but is usually pretty quick);
http://susestudio.com/
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
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