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I just bought a laptop with preinstalled Win 10 and want to replace it with my favorite Linux distro. Before that I want to backup a system disk and recovery partitions with possibility to restore it later. But some system/recovery partitions has specific entries in UEFI (like a hotkeys to start recovery, etc.).

How I can backup UEFI entries? And should I use dd to backup the drive? Thanks!

Ahmed Ashour
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Alex
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  • `efibootmgr` may be able to, though I’m not familiar with restore partitions and whatnot. UEFI boot entries are stored in NVRAM. – Daniel B Sep 25 '18 at 12:33

2 Answers2

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If you didn't made any changes to that disk, you may not need to zero free space. Make a whole disk copy (partition table, data, all OS-related and other things) to other medium with the command:

pv /dev/sdX | gzip -9 > /media/user/folder/backup.img.gz

Where sdX is the drive that you want to backup. You can find it better by commands blkid or df. Then you will have progress bar on screen about how much is left to copy. In effect you will have compressed copy of whole disk. We are compressing it to not take all the original space on the backup medium, because there will be much free space without data in the target file.

pbies
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I would use clonezilla (https://clonezilla.org/) do do a full backup of the disk to an external USB one. Clonezilla will offer you alternatives for disk/partiions to images.

tonioc
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