How to Make a Bit By Bit Image of the Whole Drive Using DD
The dd command is the most useful disk backup tool included with UNIX-based operating systems because of its simplicity and versatility. With dd, short for disk dump, you can quickly clone the entire contents of a drive, bit by bit, for backup or recovery later. Using dd you can quickly image bootable USB drives, burn ISO images to disk and perform a host of other common disk functions from a single command. While this tool is native only to UNIX-based systems, there are some Windows ports of common GNU utilities like dd.
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Instructions
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Connect your external hard drive to your computer. Insert your bootable live CD or USB into your machine and restart your computer. When the boot option comes up, choose to boot from your Live medium.
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Launch a terminal window once you have reached the desktop. Type "sudo fdisk -l" to view your connected disks and copy down the device name of the drive you want to image and of your external hard drive.
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Mount the external hard drive using the command "sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1" where /dev/sdc1 is the device name of the external drive and /mnt/sdc1 is the mount point on your current file system. You may need to use the mkdir command to create a mount point in /mnt if there isn't already one.
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Type out your dd command: "sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c > /mnt/sdc1/hda.img.gz". The if= portion specifies the input format, meaning the device name of the hard drive you want to image. The parameters under conv= and bs= specify error correction and a larger block size for speed. The dd command is piped "|" and run through the gzip compression command while it writes the disk image to /mnt/sdc1, your external hard drive, into the image file called hda.img.gz.
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