[nflug] Disk Image/Restore

[joshj at linuxmail.org]

When we last left our adventurers...

> joshj at linuxmail.org wrote:
>>  When we last left our adventurers...
>> 
>> >  Heres a dumb question, does the drive that i am copying the image to
>> >  (using dd) have to be formatted? Im going to guess it doesnt but I
>> >  just want to make sure.
>>
>>  Nope. "dd" copies from the drive byte-for-byte. So filesystem and all is
>>  copied. It will even copy the MBR. A coworker of mine used it to copy
>>  winxp from drive to drive. It booted without incident.
>>
>>  You can use dd to backup the MBR  and then replace it before doing
>>  something
>>  risky (aka: reinstall windows):
>>
>>  dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.img bs=512 count=1

<snip>

> Only if you were doing an entire drive would it copy the mbr. If the

My bad. I thought he was copying the whole drive.

> partition being copied was on the 2nd, 3rd partition persay, the mbr would 
> not be copied. The "fdisk /mbr" command simply blanks the mbr anyway. It is a 
> safe thing to do just to be sure. If this is a brand new drive, never having 
> anything installed on it, it is probably not needed. 98 does not need 
> anything on the mbr to boot.

Win98 must have some kind of "boot loader" (or equivilant) on the first 
512 of the HD otherwise there would be nothing to pass control to the
kernel, right?

-Josh



> _______________________________________________
> nflug mailing list
> nflug at nflug.org
> http://www.nflug.org/mailman/listinfo/nflug
>
_______________________________________________
nflug mailing list
nflug at nflug.org
http://www.nflug.org/mailman/listinfo/nflug