[plug] dd'ing Windows disks

[Ben New]

maybe this is just ignorance talking, but does dd copy the mbr? cus i'm 
guessing it won't boot if the mbr isn't copied :-}

Ben



Derek Fountain wrote:

>I had a heart stopping moment yesterday when the 120GB disk in my Windows box 
>locked up. I initially thought it was dead, unresponsive as it was to a power 
>cycle, but I found that disconnecting it from the IDE bus, then reconnecting 
>it made it happy again.
>
>First question: anyone seen that before or know what might be going on?
>
>Nervous because I never managed to work out a backup plan for such a big disk, 
>I went to PLE and bought another 120GB drive - from the same manufacturer as 
>the old one, although a slightly different model (onboard cache size is 
>different). I booted into Knoppix and did a dd from /dev/hda to /dev/hdb. An 
>overnight run later and the dd completed.
>
>The weird thing is that the old disk still boots (although Windows barfs 
>halfway through the boot process if the second disk is attached as a slave), 
>but the new one doesn't. I disconnect the old one, switch the jumpers and 
>cables to the new one, and the BIOS tells me there's a disk error and that I 
>should press ctrl-alt-del. The BIOS can see the disk, and identifies it 
>correctly, so I'm somewhat baffled.
>
>dd'ing from hda to hdb would, I'd have thought, produce an identical copy. The 
>fact the BIOS won't boot from the copy suggests that dd has missed something 
>which the BIOS needs. Or possibly the disk surface contains a flag which 
>relates to the old disk model, which the BIOS reads and disagrees with. Or 
>something.
>
>Any ideas, anyone? I'd like a working identical copy of this drive ASAP so if 
>the old one fails during the punishment exercise I intend to give it, I can 
>just drop the copy into place.
>  
>


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