We recently got a new ASUS laptop for the boys to use (I’ll use it too, it’s pretty sweet) which came with Windows 8.
It did not come with the install CD or license key, but included a recovery partition and the key in the BIOS. Now that we’ve had it for a few weeks and verified that all of the hardware works, we are going to put Ubuntu on it, but I wanted to make sure that I would still be able to use the Windows 8 license on it if I wanted.
So, using the Win8 recovery program, I createad a bootable recovery disk onto a USB stick and I wanted to back it up, as well as be able to make a clone of it if need be.
Following are the dd commands to make that happen:
First, do a tail of /var/log/messages before you plug in the usb drive. You should see it be recognized by the machine as sd[something]. Or, you can do an fdisk -l and should see the usb stick (as well as the other drives on your machine)
Be warned, make sure that you have the devices correct before you run these commands or you may destroy data on your machine.
Assuming that the usb stick is sdg, clone the disk to a file on another computer
dd if=/dev/sdg of=./windows_8_rcvry_usb_asus.dd conv=notruncCopy the file to another USB stick (assuming that /dev/sdg is the USB drive because all data on /dev/sdg will be destroyed during this operation):
dd if=./windows_8_rcvry_usb_asus.dd of=/dev/sdg conv=notruncJust make sure that the usb drive to which you are copying is the same size or larger than the original one that you copied from.