[BTex]

I have heard about a dd command that will duplicate a disk or image. could someone pass on a little more info a command line for an example or somthing along those lines

[lynch]

Sure
Say you want to create an emergency bootdisk:
dd if=/boot/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0 bs=8192
if=uses the specified filename as the input file
of=same as if but points to output file(in this case the floppy device)
bs=specifies the size of the input and output bit streams in bytes.
This command does a whole lot more than create bootdisks.It can be used for backup(slow) convert text from lowercase to uppercase,convert to other formats.You can even make a real-time copy of a CD:
dd if=/dev/hdx | cdrecord -v speed=xx dev=x,x,x fs=8 -data -
The x's are for your cd-drive (hdb maybe) cd-burner speed(speed=12) dev=0,0,0 as specified in cdrecord -scanbus as your burner's scsi ID number.
The only thing I've used dd for is the bootdisk task;I found the CD copying trick in a book called Linux Server Hacks from O'Reilly.
HTH
lynch