boot drive backup plan.. dd god enough?

[RabbieBurns]

Just wondering if this would work.

My boot drive is a 250gb drive, partitioned with a boot partition and a 20gb root partition, and the rest is for data.

Can I use dd to backup the boot and root partitions to a file image, and then just use that file image to dump onto a replacement disk in event of failure. Does it matter what size the replacement disk is?

Ive only really been backup up /etc and the home folders for now, and had just planned doing a reinstall then restore those, but if I can just dump the backed up partitions onto a new disk, would that probably be easier?

[kmount]

Honest answer? Don't know, suspect powdarrmonkey or Geoff may well do though.

I've used dd to manage entire LVMs before to migrate from to another and it on the whole went pretty well.

I suppose as long as the new disk was fdisk'd properly with the correct boot flag set you could dd the image over and then use resize2fs or whatever to grow the resulting filesystem if you did..

One for a test bed me thinks

[RabbieBurns]

yea, im just trying to think of the easiest solution for me being so far away. Although I think from the remote end point of view a swap out the drive, pop in the minimal, start sshd and then a remote rebuild, will probably be just as simple. Might even give me a chance to try genkernel ;p

Hopefully the disk will be fine though and I wont even need to worry

[freak]

Backing up the boot sector should be as easy as this, in theory (remember to change hda to whatever):

dd if=/dev/hda of=boot.bak bs=512 count=1

And then to recover:

dd if=boot.bak of=/dev/hda

In theory anyway.