TRICKS for partimage and mbr

[Guest GorGor]

Trickking the master boot record with partimage

Assuming you have only one partition for linux and one for swap.

 

Make changes if you have taken experts advice and separated / from /home from /usr ETC

I have 2 drives and decided to play with win98 on drive 1. My partimage files are on drive 2.

 

after w98 installed I loaded partimage floppies and they say

hda1 fat32 2G

balance of HDA left unallocated

hdc1 reiserfs (irrelevant)

 

Natually enough, my hda mbr has now been overwritten.To get back to my trusty linux.

 

STEPS

1 Lload partimage floppies and mount drive 2 partition 1 for the source files.

2 Highlight hda1 (even tho its fat32) and select restore mbr

3 restore mbr using my linux backup image file selecting hda to overwrite. You are given a choice of drive 1 or 2 as there is one mbr per drive..

4 do a full reboot with the partimage floppies. The NEW mbr is now detected

but partimage showed

hda1 fat32 7G SIZE CHANGED BUT WRONG FORMAT

swap SIZE OK BUT NOT NOT FORMATTED

hdc1 reiserfs (irrelevant)

5 Highlight hda1 for partition to be restored and restore using my backup linux file

6 ON reboot, go into mcc and format the swap file

 

As you can see this trick only works for those with 2 drives (with 2 mbrs)

 

It should work for removable media but I can't test as I don't have a cd burner. boo hoo

 

I AM GUESSING for cd images

1 load partimage and mount cdrom for source files

2 highlight hda1 and select restore mbr from LINUX cd image file

3 reboot partimage to reset the mbr and mount cdrom for source files

partimage should now show hda1 as still fat32 but YOUR original partition size

4 now select hda1 and overwrite with source image.

5 reboot and format swap file.

 

I AM GUESSING that if you have a number of linux parttions, then you MUST restore the mbr for the first parttion HDA1 as its the one with the mbr. hda2 or hda5 etc will not have any mbr info.

 

So, after doing hda1, b4 you reboot into linux, you will need to restore all of the other linux partitions needed for MANDRAKE

[Guest GorGor]

oops

 

I just found out that you can use an image that is NOT hda1 for mbr restoring.

I assumed that hda1 was the only one to save the 512 bytes of hda, silly me.

 

So, you can restore a mbr using any image file and then restore an image to a partition with an image file that may not have been the source for the mbr.

 

good hunting