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 | My personal blog
Linux Evangelist
Play hard stay cool

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!