"Ghosting" your harddisk

[Visti]

Hi guys, I have a really nice setup on my laptop here now and I am really happy about it. But I'm also a curious guy and I would like to check out other distros and setups and whatnot to see if I like something better.

However, I would like to easily be able to return to this exact setup, so if I use something like Ghost for Linux, could I just whack in the DVD I used to back the HD up on and then it would just be this exact setup again?

[quinnten83]

Theoretically it should.
I never tried it though.
Also I hear symantec ghost is not so great for that.
you can try ghost for linux of clonezilla, though.

[mips]

dd ddrescue dd_rescue clonezilla are some options with clonezilla probably being the easiest to use.

http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ddrescue/
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html