ghost root disk on Red Hat Linux

I have been reading to no avail on how to create a root ghost disk. The purpose of this task is that prior to patching my linux servers, I would create a copy of my root disk to an empty disk for failback in the event that the patching has issues. I currently configured my root disk with 2 partitions, the 1st partition is the boot partition and the 2nd partition is the LVM partition.

# parted -s /dev/sda print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-139392.000 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 101.975 primary ext3 boot
2 101.975 139384.270 primary lvm

I would like to know if anyone has done this and if so can they provide me with some suggestions/solutions.

Thank you,

Willy

Willy,

Look into a product called Acronis Echo Server for Linux. We use it on SuSE 10, and I can recover root disk in little over 3 minutes over network.

Willy,

You can use the dd command

dd if=/dev/sda of=< the disk you want it to be stored.> ex /dev/sdb

cheers.