[TriLUG] Re: backup up a laptop disk for replacement

[Rodent of Unusual Size]

if anyone is interested in the results, i ended up buying a superbay
hdd adapter for the thinkpad, putting the new drive in it, booting
from the old one in standalone, and using dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc .
the bs and count parameters were determined from looking in the
/proc/ide files.

this resulted in the new disk being 'dirty' when i booted from it, but
the only file essentially not read-only was the swapfile -- which
doesn't have persistent info.

worked a treat.  i would have preferred to boot from a cd, but you
canna do that if the superbay has an hdd in it. :-)