HOWTO+-+Take+Backup-Restore+of+a+Hard+Drive+or+MBR+Using+dd


 * full hard disk copy **

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image dd if=/dev/hdx | gzip > /path/to/image.gz

Hdx could be hda, hdb etc. In the second example gzip is used to compress the image if it is really just a backup.

**Restore Backup of hard disk copy**

dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx

gzip -dc /path/to/image.gz | dd of=/dev/hdx

**MBR backup**

In order to backup only the first few bytes containing the MBR and the partition table you can use dd as well.

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image count=1 bs=512

**MBR restore**

dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx Add "count=1 bs=446" to exclude the partition table from being written to disk. You can manually restore the table.