Imaging using dd in linux

I needed to image the hard drive of the PowerEdge vmware server without imaging the LVM portion since I already have 200+ GB on it.

I cannot boot with any LIVE CD and see the hard drive on the Perc 5/i controller except for the one that was on Dell's site. Using this:

# fdisk -l -u /dev/sda

This shows the Start and End of each partition in 512 byte sectors.

So I was able to use
# dd if=/dev/sdc of=/media/exthd/harddrive.img bs=512 conv=sync,noerror count=25455345542

In the comments of this website was where I found the tidbits to use it.

http://www.linuxweblog.com/dd-image