# How's this for cool?

**URL:** <https://pheromonetalk.com/t/hows-this-for-cool/497>\
**Category:** Lounge\
**Created:** [July 13, 2006, 11:47am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/hows-this-for-cool/497 "2006-07-13T11:47:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![catlord17](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@catlord17](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/catlord17)\
**Post date:** [July 13, 2006, 11:47am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/hows-this-for-cool/497/1 "2006-07-13T11:47:38Z")

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A couple weeks ago, I sensed impending doom. So I made a compressed image of my entire laptop hard drive using the dd utility in Linux. It resulted in a 47.5 gigabyte .zip file on my 400 gb external hard drive.

These last two days, everything has been going wrong, and I eventually ended up with a partition table that was so scrambled, nothing could read it. Not BSD, not Linux, not Windows, and not any of the tools from any of those operating systems designed partition. The laptop became completely unbootable… and the laptop **IS** my business.

Right now, I am writing this from a LiveCD of PCLinuxOS on my laptop. While I write this, my system is being restored through the reverse of the process I used to back it up. It takes a while to do that, so I’m surfing the net while I wait.

Naturally, dd isn’talways the best choice for backing up a system. If you try to restore to a disk of any difference in size at all, it may fail. But for free, and accessible from a live CD, you can’t beat it.

Now all I have to do is pray that I made the backup correctly…