nixCraft

Hello -

Thanks for reading. Using linux live cd's, the dd command, and the new ntfsprogs package, I have managed to make a bit-by-bit clone of my Vista operating partition. This cloning was done to an external USB drive.

The reason I did this is so that I can reimage the Vista partition back to the internal hard drive in less than 10 minutes, instead of going through the mega-long factory restore process provided by the OEM manufacturer's restore partition.

So now I have an 8,756 MB clone sitting on the external hard drive, and I am wondering: Is there a way to now copy this 8,756 bit-by-bit to DVD media?

This would give me an optical backup of the bit-by-bit lay down, just in case I ever lost the backup partition on my USB external hard drive. Instinct tells me this is not possible because of the way optical media is read/write.

Thanks for any insights!!

Yes you can copy using dd

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Vivek Gite
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happy to see someone else who figures he would use dd to speed up the restore process. so how did you do it? Inquiring minds want to know!
I am not duel booting so will I need to install grub, or will dd copy the boot sector? another problem I see is figuring out how many bytes XP is using; how would that be done? Thanks!