I'm starting afresh here, because I think this is a different suggestion to anything else I've seen. Something I successfully experimented with a few months back, with a dual booting setup which had only a very small FAT32 partition with Windows 98 installed on it, was using dd to create an image of the Windows partition, using something like dd if=/dev/hda1 of=WindowsPartitionImage Once finished messing around with Windows (and maybe screwing it up in the process) it's very simple indeed to restore it using dd if=WindowsPartitionImage of=/dev/hda1 IMHO the big advantage of doing this is that the OS being backed up is not running i.e. I know that none of the files are changing during the backup process, therefore a true snapshot is obtained which can be used to restore the OS to exactly the state it was in when the backup was taken. To do this with a Linux installation, perhaps it would be possible to use one of the distributions now available which can boot from a CD or even a USB flash drive (I've not tried out either of these) and use dd to perform a complete back up of the Linux installation which is now not running, perhaps to an external USB connected hard drive. Hope this provides food for thought to whoever started this thread (was it Rick?) And ALWAYS test backup strategies before you need them! Dave F
