You can use the exact same command to back up the entire hard disk (replace hda1 with hda). Make sure you are on a larger partition or on a secondary drive and perform the following command:ĭd if=/dev/hda1 of=./part1.image to backup(repeat for different partitions)ĭd if=./part1.image of=/dev/hda1 to restore The most straight forward way to make a raw image of your partitions is to use dd to dump the entire partition to a single file (remember the OS access the partitions /dev/sda1 through a file interface). For example, /dev/hda or /dev/sda would refer to the first hard drive in your system (hda vs sda depends on the hard drive), and /dev/hda1 would refer to the first partition on your hard drive. There are a multitude of 'nodes' in /dev/ that are interfaces to almost all the devices on your computer. If you want the 'UNIX' way of accomplishing this, then read on.Īll references to the file system and hard disks are located locally on the virtual /dev/ filesystem.

It's essentially a low level byte-for-byte copy utility.

Dd is the low level utility that you can use to accomplish this task.

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