Taking full harddisk image of a Gentoo installation

[saivin]

Hi, as anybody would agree, installing Gentoo is pain although its a good learning experience.

But what do we do if for some reason the harddisk is wiped out and we need to install it from the beginning? With other distros its as easy as installing from current cd iso image and then updating the system (with tools like apt-get update-upgrade or yum update...).

With this in mind I would like to know if there is a method to capture our harddisk install and later use (or install(?) ) it as and when required?

Sorry, if its a dumb question but I don't know how to do it; even could not find a good phrase so as to google.

[oz]

With this in mind I would like to know if there is a method to capture our harddisk install and later use (or install(?) ) it as and when required?

Yes, you can make images of your Gentoo partitions when you get them configured just the way you want them and then restore the images to the hard drive later, when and if needed. You can find some imaging applications for that purpose here:

Drive Imaging | Linux App Finder

I've been doing this for years now with every installation and it's always worked great. It takes just a few minutes to create the images and only takes about 4 or 5 minutes for me to restore my current system to the hard drive. Creating images of tweaked installations has made it much easier for me to experiment with my system.