I presently backup my multi-OS multi-paritition boot drive (fedora core 4/ext3, WinXPServer/NTFS, WinXPHome/FAT32) with the command:

telinit 1; cp /dev/sda /dev/sdb

And this works.


Is there a command to only copy a single partition instead of an entire device?

And what about the grub stuff. Is that in a partition? My grub stuff is corrupted or the grub.conf file is bad. I can boot windows manually via grub but not fedora. How can I restore the grub and linux partitions but not the windows partition?

Thanks,
siegfried

Partitions for /dev/sda are going to be like /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, /dev/sda3, etc. You can copy them too.

The master boot record is outside of all partitions. It is the very, very first sector on the hard drive. You can copy just the boot sector like this:

A corrupt grub can't boot anything. If you can boot windows with grub, then grub is not corrupted, but maybye your partitions are, or grub.conf, and maybye you can't remember which partition number you need etc.

I'd boot the system with some sort of linux livecd to see what's going on with your partitions, and edit your grub.conf if need be.

As for how to restore a selected partition from that giant everything-backup file, I don't know. There doesn't seem to be anything like a loop device for splitting a file into partitions the way linux handles hard drives... I'll do some experimenting and see.

You can restore your boot sector easily, though, if that's the problem.

Be sure to back it up on a flash drive or something before you do that of course.

Wait. Your backup is a drive too, isn't it.

It should have partitions /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2 etc. You might need to do this to get them to become visible on /dev/sdb however, since linux needs to be told when the partition table changes. Either that, or reboot after you do that cp thing to see the new partitions. DO NOT type 'w' if you get anything but a blank message! All you want to do is write back the SAME boot sector to make fdisk tell Linux to reread it's partition table.

Yes -- my backup is a triple *bootable* drive (thank goodness -- I can verify that everything still works).

So you gave me several dd commands but not one that would copy an entire partition from one disk to another. Could you give me an example of that? On your dd commands, how do you select a block size? Where do those other numeric values come from?

So if I'm getting a grub prompt but grub cannot find the grub.conf file (which I believe is in a linux partition) that could indicate the linux partition is corrupted.

I wonder if grub could do a dd for me? hmmm... if not, then knoppix probably could.

Let's suppose I book with knoppix. Would fdisk -l enumerate my drives?

I don't understand the dd command for copying a boot sector. Where is the destination and source specified?

Thanks,
Siegfried

You don't need special commands, the ones you already have will work quite fine. Linux gives you special files for partitions that you can use the same way you use the special files it gives you for disks. I'd always use dd instead of cp for copying whole drives or partitions but GNU cp is apparently smart enough to handle nearly anything.

For the record, copying from disk A partition 1 to disk B partition 1: The "conv=noerror,sync" is something important that cp does not have as far as I know... in the case of error, it will skip that sector in the input and write a sector full of zeroes on the output. cp would probably just stop on any errors. That's what I'd think. knoppix could, yes. Though a full-on graphical interface is probably overkill. I prefer Gentoo liveCDs, or those old little Redhat sysadm disks. ...apparently it does. I did not know that. The input file is specified with the "if=something", and the output file is specified with "of=something". If they are not given, they are assumed to be standard input and standard output. the "bs=512" tells it to assume 512 bytes per sector. The count=1 tells it to copy one and ONLY one sector. So, it copies the first and ONLY the first sector from the hard drive to file. tadah!

If I use dd or cp, will they only copy the contents?

The contents of the misbehaving partition seem to be perfectly intact. I can boot SuSE live from a DVD and mount the partition. The problem is that grub won't recognize it as a boot partition.

Is there a way I can only change the attributes of the partition? will dd or cp change the partition attributes?

Thanks,
Siegfried

I was able to boot SuSE live via a DVD I burned and mount the damaged partition. It mounted fine and all the files seemed to be intact!

fdisk -l did not complain about anything.

parted's "check 5" command gave this strange error message

Error: File system has an incompatable feature enabled.

What does that mean?

Any suggestions has to how to make this partition compatible with grub so I can boot fedora again?

Thanks,
Siegfried