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Possible to restore a Boot partition without overwriting the whole disk?

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smilingcrow

Member
Joined
Mar 9, 2002
Location
The belly of the beast (Wales)
I've been using Ghost 2003 successfully to clone a bootable partition
to DVD-R. If I try restoring the partition to a partition on a disk,
it fails to boot. However, I can restore the partition to a whole
disk and it will then boot. I would like to be able to restore the
partition to the first physical partition on a disk, without loosing
the data on the other partitions. Do I need to use different software
or am I using Ghost incorrectly for my needs?
I have been using the Clone function in Ghost in the following way:

Clone the C: Partition to a DVD-R. The disk in question has at least
two partitions and the C: drive is the first on the disk.
I then boot from the DVD-R and restore the DVD-R to a Disk; restoring
to a partition leaves me with an unbootable system.

I am cloning Windows 2000 Pro & XP Pro and I have too much data on the other partitions to make it practical to clone them every time I want to clone the C drive; more than 200 GB.
Help appreciated.
 
Once you copy the data over, try rebuilding the MBR.

Start a repair session off the XP CD and issue 'fixmbr'

Let me know if that works.
 
I know Ghost will write over a whole disk when backing up/ restoring a disk.

you have C: (main) & a D: (restore) partition on your hdd. & you want to restore ghost to D: whithout overwritting C: (or visa versa)

I don't think there is a short way of doing this.

-Got me stumped too.

You could copy all contents of D: to another drive,or DVD/CD, restore C:, use something like partition magic, creating a D: & then copy the files over from the other drive, DVD/CD.

I hate when this happens.

Long way to do it.
 
{PMS}fishy said:
Once you copy the data over, try rebuilding the MBR.
Start a repair session off the XP CD and issue 'fixmbr'.
Thanks. I'm think I've tried that, but I'll give it another go.
On the same theme; is there an easy way to 'clean up' the MBR? i.e. remove old entries. Sometimes there seems to be ghost entries from previous installs!
 
WarriorII said:
You could copy all contents of D: to another drive,or DVD/CD, restore C:, use something like partition magic, creating a D: & then copy the files over from the other drive, DVD/CD.
I have a 250 GB SATA and 160 GB PATA.
Windows is on partition 0 on the SATA ~ 15 GB.
The rest of the drive is nearly full ~ 210 GB.
The PATA is fairly empty for now but growing quickly with DV video footage; ~ 13 GB per hour of video.

I am currently using your solution by backing up my SATA data to my PATA and free space on the other computer on the home network. However, this isn’t always going to be possible as my data grows and my home network solution changes. It would be so much easier and flexible to do it the ‘correct way’.
 
smilingcrow said:
Thanks. I'm think I've tried that, but I'll give it another go.
On the same theme; is there an easy way to 'clean up' the MBR? i.e. remove old entries. Sometimes there seems to be ghost entries from previous installs!
Shouldn't be, unless you don't reformat between installations, and really not even then.

Generally speaking the Master Boot Record contains the initial boot loader code (446 bytes) followed by partition table entries and a MBR signature, for a total of 1/2 KiB. It's one of those things that should probably be left well enough alone except for programs that are meant to edit it, since messing with it will _really_ break your Windows (and other OSen) install and possibly cause loss of data since MBRs may also contain partition information.

For an idea of just what the MBR does (including, for purposes of showing you just what is involved in loading the first steps of the OS) look here.

FIXMBR should make it so that the partition table entries and master boot record code area are properly configured. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a good way to easily back up your boot sector through Windows or conventional means. (The *nix command dd can do it, since it reads directly and writes directly...)

If you've got something like Knoppix on hand, you could try
Code:
# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
if you are using an IDE drive, or
Code:
# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
if you are using a Serial ATA or SCSI (highly unlikely) drive...replacing the 'a' in /dev/drivetype with whichever device it is on the chain. This does a straight-out copy of the boot sector to the floppy disk drive, so you'll need a disk in there. You can specify any file or device, such as your thumb drive (/mnt/usbdisk/bootsector.bin) or, whatever. WARNING! Do not confuse the if= and of= segments of these commands, or you'll _really_ make the drive unbootable!

That's the only way, off the top of my head, that I can think of to do this directly.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the lengthy reply.

Captain Newbie said:
FIXMBR should make it so that the partition table entries and master boot record code area are properly configured.

Okay. I’m wondering whether Ghost will always copy enough partition information to the DVD-R, so that the Windows Install Repair process can fix any MBR problem. Any idea whether this is dependent on which Ghost process I use; Copy Disk, Copy Partition or Clone Disk? Cheers.
 
In spite of all the times I've used SystemWorks, I've never used Ghost, so I won't answer that.

Conjecturally, if Ghost does its job properly, then it should copy enough information to the destination media to preserve some semblance of partition order. Don't quote me on it, though.
 
I just ran the Repair function for Win2k and chose the console option as I don’t have an ERD. I ran the fixmbr utility but it didn’t report any detail, which I think means it didn’t find anything to fix. I tried rebooting but still no joy.
 
Problem solved. The partition wasn’t set as active. I used Partition Magic to set it as active and voila it now boots. I don’t think it was necessary to go through the repair process and use fixmbr. The next time I try a re-install I’ll report back on whether that is the case. I’m hoping that the Partition Magic boot floppy will also allow the active partition to be set. I booted to my SATA drive and ran Partition Magic from there. This really makes life easier :)
 
After further experimentation I currently feel satisfied that I’ve sorted out this issue.
I’ve left Ghost 2003 behind and moved over to Drive Image 2002. The reason is that when copying partitions with Ghost, the drive letter assignments get screwed and I’m left with no paging file and therefore the System won’t load. This is after I follow the correct procedure which is listed below. The details below are for copying an active Windows partition from one drive to another, as the first partition on each drive. Both drives have other partitions which are not to be disturbed by the process. If it wasn’t for that the process would be simple. Here are the complications:

Boot windows with Source drive attached but Destination drive disconnected.
Shutdown system and connect Destination drive.
Boot from Ghost floppy and copy Windows partition from Source to Destination drives.
Shutdown system and disconnect Source drive.
Start system and boot from Destination drive.
At this point Windows should recognise that any partitions on the Destination drive haven’t been accessed before and intelligently assign drive letters to them. This should leave you with the Windows partition as C and everything working. Unfortunately, Ghost seemed to screw this up and left Windows on F, expecting a page file on C which doesn’t exist, so it won’t load. I ran the exact same process with Drive Image and it worked.
The next step is to connect the Source drive again, which then gets assigned drive letters by Windows which don’t disturb the working version of Windows on the Destination drive. It’s easy really once you understand the process.

One other problem may ensue in that the Destination drive may not boot because it is not active. You can rectify this by booting from the Drive Image floppy and setting it as active.
 
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