"Ghost" IBM Thinkpad drive

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Thanks to all who replied with suggestions.  I wound up using two 
methods to 'ghost' the current disk image: partimage (for convinence), 
and dd (in case the partimage restore fails):

1) Use partimage:
While partimage is present on knoppix, it wouldn't talk to the 
statically linked partimage I downloaded directly from partimage.org and 
got running on my internal RH box (soon to be migrated to debian 
testing).  To work around this, I simply copied the partimage client 
from the download to knoppix, and everything was happy.  The resulting 
image file of /dev/hda1 is about 1.1G

2) Use dd:
I settled on the following command for a 'raw' dump of the entire disk 
image to my remote system:

dd if=/dev/hda | rsh user at backup.system dd of=/path/to/backup.file

Note I used rsh rather than ssh, as the laptop system is old enough the 
ssh encryption overhead was ruining transfer rates, and the transfer is 
across a trusted internal lan.  Even with a 'raw' rsh copy, I'm only 
seeing 1 MB/s transfer.  With newer systems, the ssh overhead would 
probably be tolerable.

I am also seperately backing up the partition table and MBR, with 
commands from the partimage site:

Backup MBR:
dd if=/dev/hda of=backup-hda.mbr count=1 bs=512

Backup Partition table:
sfdisk -d /dev/hda > backup-hda.sf

I have sofar been unable to test the images (no free machine with a 10G 
partition to test with).  Once I can verify the partimage backup works 
for restore, I can do away with the raw dd image.

Thanks again for all the help!

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net