rescue Windows systems, backup/restore
"Doug McCasland" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.bbc.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi, I support both Linux and Windows system. I'm interested in using LNX-BBC to rescue crashed disks. That's a natural thing for rescuing Linux, but what are suggestions for restoring a blown Windows disk? Here are some thoughts and questions: Restoring Windows NTFS fs fdisk can create NTFS-labeled partitions, but I don't see a tool out there to create NTFS file system on said partition, while booted under Unix. So you might say, don't use NTFS, use FAT32. Restoring FAT32 fs This can be done of course with fdisk and mkfs.vfat. Restoring Windows MBR How can I restore (or backup for that matter) the Win MBR under Linux? This is different for XP, 2K, Me, etc. I know about the DOS command fixmbr, but this is somehow different in XP. I need to look into this some more. Backup/Restoring Files I've been playing around with lots of backup/restore ideas. One that works well for me: 1. attach backup medium to Windows box and reboot in Windows (in my case, I plug in a big IDE drive). 2. I have tcsh.exe and some shell scripts on the backup drive. These scripts use gnu-tar and gzip (for DOS) to create .tgz files on the backup disk. I have found these to be pretty fast. 3. After a crash, I can just untar these into the right places while booted under LNX. However, backing up the c:\windows, c:\Documents and Settings, and perhaps c:\Program Files will not totally work. Some of the files are locked while Win is running. So that's where I could boot under LNX and run shell scripts to tar-gzip those directories to the backup medium. One drawback is that tar doesn't get all of the file attributes (notably hidden and system). A kludgy solution to that is to create a DOS batch script to reset the attributes after restore. I found a neat freeware command to do this: locate c:\windows\ "c:\Documents and Settings\" /h /O:"attrib &A &F" > attribs.bat The locate command is at http://www.highfiber.com/~raster/locate.zip -- -- Doug McCasland Healdsburg, California <[email protected]> Looking for low-cost Internet? DialUpLink.net http://dialuplink.net