adipradana said:
Try using SystemRescueCd (
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page). It contains many tools for backup and restoring entire partitions, particularly PartImage.
You can follow this link
http://www.sysresccd.org/Howto_install-usb-stick to make a bootable usb stick.
That's a good start, but Partimage only does one hd partition at a time and doesn't deal with the MBR. A better choice, imho is to use the linux command: dd and make a backup of the whole Acer SSD drive to an image file.
Here's a general synopsis of the system I use to do this.
I have an external 2.5" USB drive and I've partitioned it into 2 partitions. A small one that holds the sysresccd.org stuff mentioned above, making /dev/sdb1 the bootable drive when F12 is pressed and USB is selected. The remaining part of this HD is where I can keep backups along with anything else that I want.
So I attached the external hd to the Acer, start the Acer, hit F12 and select to boot from the external USB drive. This starts to bootup and a MR: prompt is presented. Hit "A" key. Then hit "1" and the system boots the systemrescue system. Just hit enter when questioned to go with the bootup prompts unless you need to setup the keyboard for something other than US English. Eventually you're at a root prompt. Once, there, here are the steps to backup the WHOLE SSD drive:
1) You'll need to mount the 2nd partition of the ext hd so that you can write the image file to it...
mount -t auto /dev/sdb2 /mnt/windows
I'm using /mnt/windows as the mount point, just because that directory already exists when the system is booted up.
2) If you like you can navigate now to /mnt/windows and create a directory there if one doesn't already exist where you want the image file saved into.
cd /mnt/windows
mkdir Backup
ls -l to check the successful creation of ths directory.
3) Now we're going to backup all of the 8GB SSD (which includes the MBR, 1st partition and swap partition) to an image file within /mnt/windows/Backup ...
And we're going to compress the image file as it's being created (by piping the dd through the gzip command) to keep it smaller than the 8GB it would be if dd alone was used ...
dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /mnt/windows/Backup/hdimage.gz
After entering the above command and hitting Enter, the cursor will move down and NOTHING will show you any progress. Just be patient, can take 10 or so minutes to write the image file and you'll be notified when it completes.
4) That's it, you have the SSD drive backed up.
Now you want to shutdown your systemrescue session:
shutdown -h now
Unplug your ext drive when the computer has shutdown. End of what you need to do, for a FULL backup.
Now, in the event you want to RESTORE this image back to the SSD drive, overwriting everything on the drive, you'll do this:
1) Connect your ext hd to the Acer and start it up, hitting F12 to boot from it.
At the MR: prompt, type A, then type 1 to indicate bootup from the first partition on that drive
2) As above Enter your way through the bootup prompts, again only needing to change what keyboard you're using if not US English.
3) When you reach the Linux root prompt, mount the 2nd partition where the image file is:
mount -t auto /dev/sdb2 /mnt/windows
Navigate to the directory where you saved your image file, in my example above, you'd do:
cd /mnt/windows/Backup
Now let's start the restore which will overwrite your SSD with the contents of your backup image file:
gzip -dc /mnt/windows/Backup/hdimage.gz | dd of=/dev/sda
in the above line gzip is unzipping the gz file and piping it to the dd command which is writing it to your SSD drive.
When it finishes, and this can take a number of minutes, you'll be back at the prompt and your SSD drive will be restored.
4) shutdown the system:
shutdown -h now
OK, here's some tips on this whole thing. Once you've created this setup on an external USB hard drive, when you plug it into a running Acer, you can access these partitions. You can use your regular Acer system to add directories to that second storage partition, so you could for example add: Backup2 which you could use to deposit another image file in a later backup session following the instructions above. Just replace /mnt/windows/Backup with /mnt/windows/Backup2 and have the second later image stored there.
NOTE: this whole procedure is assuming that you have just the one external USB hard drive plugged in. If you have some other cards/USB drives plugged in, then the storage partition may not be assigned /dev/sdb2. Make SURE that you know how that partition has been assigned. The command: fdisk -l (that's a lower case L) will tell you what disk devices are recognized and how they're assigned.
Hope this helps someone.
Cheers.
