How to Backup a Hard Disk Drive Independant of Filesystem

I recently wanted to install Linux onto a USB thumb drive. The laptop was running Windows 8.1.

Hardware Required

WD HDD 4TB Green

Large Hard Disk Drive (At least double the capacity of the drive you want to backup)
USB Thumb Drive (At least 2GB)

Software Required

Desired Linux distribution ISO image
Universal USB installer Software

How to Do it

Boot up the Computer from the USB Thumb Drive.

Every computer is different. Some you need to go inside BIOS and configure the boot order. Some you can press F11 or F12 at the boot logo screen and choose a boot device.

With newer machines this can be done from inside Windows by going to

Start>PC Settings>Update and recovery>Recovery>Advanced Startup>

You can select book from EUFI USB

Attach the Large hard disk to the computer

Before you attach the disk, from the terminal type

$ sudo fdisk -l

Then attach the Large disk and issue the command again

$ sudo fdisk -l

Have a look out for the new disk. It should show up as \dev\sdX

Open a Terminal Window and Run this command.

From the terminal issue the following command.

$ dd status=progress if=/dev/sda of=/media/

This will take a Looooong time. I backed up a 500GB SATA disk and it took 29 hours and 27 minutes.