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Copy of windows recovery partition


xboxboy
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Hi guys. as detailed in my other thread :New Dual boot install

 

I have copied the recovery patition of my my Acer over to my Mandriva box.

 

This file is called recover.iso, I have tried to burn this file using K3B, but I fails to work, both as a *.iso image and as a data file. Can anyone help?

 

Also, does anyone know if I can access the contents of this file to verify that the copy worked perfectly?

 

Thanks all.

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Not sure why K3B is failing. Is the file too big for the disk perhaps?

 

You should be able to access the contents of the file using the following command as root:

 

mount -o loop -t iso9660 /path/to/recover.iso /path/to/mount/dir/

 

Mounts the iso in a directory. Use dolphin or whatever to have a look at it.

 

Hope that helps :)

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Not sure why K3B is failing. Is the file too big for the disk perhaps?

 

 

Thanks, how silly of me. Pile size is shown to be 4.9Gib and the DVD's are 4.7Gb...obviously thats not going to work. I will look at compressing the file for burning.

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mount -o loop -t iso9660 /path/to/recover.iso /path/to/mount/dir/

 

Mounts the iso in a directory. Use dolphin or whatever to have a look at it.

 

Hope that helps :)

 

Will this command work given how I copied the data over? I used

 

dd if=/dev/sda1 | ssh username@host "dd of=path/to/recover.iso"

 

So I didn't specify it as an actual iso file...It didn't seem to mount at all.

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Yes, just do:

 

mount -o loop recovery.iso /mnt/iso

 

of course assuming the file to mount is recovery.iso and the directory /mnt/iso exists :)

 

Then just look inside /mnt/iso and see what you see.

 

As yves says you can rename it to recover.img if you like because I generally create as iso, so I'm just silly :-) Mounting with the loop command and iso9660 won't work because it's not a true iso, hence my command above should mount it, cos it'll just automatically detect (or should) the filesystem (which will probably be FAT).

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Yes, just do:

 

mount -o loop recovery.iso /mnt/iso

 

of course assuming the file to mount is recovery.iso and the directory /mnt/iso exists :)

 

Then just look inside /mnt/iso and see what you see.

 

 

Cheers, that did the trick. Looks to have copied perfectly...

 

Now to compress it to reduce the Pile size mentioned earlier....oops silly me!

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Cheers, that did the trick. Looks to have copied perfectly...

 

Now to compress it to reduce the Pile size mentioned earlier....oops silly me!

 

Try:

 

tar cvjf recover.iso.tar.bz2 recover.iso

 

of course depending on whatever name the file is now be it recover.iso or recover.img :)

 

bzip2 compression should be pretty good and compress it more than a standard .tar or .tar.gz or .tgz.

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Rethought the task at hand.

 

I have dd a complete copy of the recovery partition /dev/sda1

 

The windows OS is installed on /dev/sda2.

 

So I am thinking I need to copy the MBR with:

 

dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/mbr bs=512 count=1

Thats what googles, telling me.

 

To determine the partition layout I am thinking:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda > part_layout.txt

Which should provide me with the partition layout? Yes? And apparently I can restore it with

sfdisk /dev/hda < part_layout.txt

 

My concern is, that I received no restore disks with the unit. Acer think that you can always "restore" it from with-in windows.

 

So should I bork my windows install (oh how tragic :P ) I need to be able to restore it. Thats why I'm thinking I need the recovery partition, and the MBR along with the partition layout so I can re-partition the drive correctly. But even then, if windows dies, I'm not sure if the restore process can be started?....I almost need to image the windows OS...

 

Am i on the right track here guys?

 

Edit: I've just hunted around the net, looks like I can boot into the recovery mode from the bios screen.

Edited by xboxboy
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The disks you make using the Acer tools just create a nice recovery DVD for you that you can start your computer from. I have an acer and it does this, and I used the recovery disks once to restore the system. You don't need Windows, you just boot from the recovery DVD's you created.

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The disks you make using the Acer tools just create a nice recovery DVD for you that you can start your computer from. I have an acer and it does this, and I used the recovery disks once to restore the system. You don't need Windows, you just boot from the recovery DVD's you created.

 

Ian I should clarify that I cannot make recovery dvd's with the Acer Aspire One. Reports all over the net with the same complaint. That feature is removed from the e-recovery software on the Aspire One. Otherwise, yes, I would have just made a recovery dvd and used that if things ever got messy. But as I can't make a recovery dvd i wanted to take the steps of backing up the recovery partition.

 

So should I still back up the MBR and the partition layout?

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