Ok, my laptop (a thinkpad R50e) has a hard drive thats beginning to fail, so, while its still useable i want to get an image of the recovery partition and store it on my PC until i get a new harddrive. i don't want to spend a lot of money for programs like norton ghost because i would only use it once or twice before its outdated and then useless.

 

i have found 1 program that can get an image of it but it uses its own format (.arc) that is useless because i can't burn to DVD with that.

 

So, eh, how would i go about getting an image of this?

Acronis TrueImage is supposed to be a pretty good alternative to Ghost, and lets you burn the image to DVDs.

 

I don't know of anything that simply converts your hard drive into an ISO without putting its own interface in between in some way. The closest thing I've seen is the corporate edition of Ghost (runs about $79), which lets you create a DVD that includes the Ghost software on the first disc, so that you can boot off the backup DVD itself and then replace the image onto the hard drive.

Heh uh I've been having a problem posting a response, 403 forbidden, so you can just read it here...

http://1veedo.homelinux.com/sci403post.html

ok i got it done using partimage. the drive is now dead and smells of burning so i don't think its gonna come back. i just hope the image is fine.

If you just wanted a raw dump of data from the drive, by far the best bet is to use dd. In fact, if you have two identically-sized drives, it's as simple as running dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb.

the image worked an i now have a nice new shiny 120GB drive on my lappy.

Good to know - I was just pointing it out for future reference