Reinstalling SunOS 4.1.4 without CD drive

A very generous list member just gave me a SPARCStation 20 with SunOS 4.1.4 on it. I thought the first thing I would do would be to image its hard drive in my Linux PC, in case I ever wanted to start fresh. I assume that if I make a bitwise copy of it, I can later write those same bits out. But now I'm wondering what would happen if the disk developed marked bad sectors; would that make an exact image impossible to write onto it? I have a disc image of that release, but unfortunately no SCSI CD-ROM. It occurs to me that I could perhaps make a SunOS filesystem on Linux and untar things from either the install CD or the image of the original HD into it, but I don't know if that would produce something actually bootable. I'm hoping there would be some way within Linux to capture the actual format of the filesystem to use as a skeleton. Does anyone know if this is possible (viz. creating a valid, bootable filesystem and untarring files into it)? Or should I just invest in a CD-ROM drive? -- Eric Christopherson