A laptop hard disk is being defective, but I managed to be lucky enough to get access to it, using an Ubuntu live cd.

Now, I think it would be nice to dump the whole thing, using, for instance, a combination of gzip and split. But that would make the resulting files unusable. I could make a VMware image of it instead. I'm currently looking for the answer, which involves finding how vmware manages fixed size virtual partitions, but maybe you already did this before.

Thanks.