On Tuesday 21 October 2003 04:17 pm, you wrote: > On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Kent Hauser wrote: > > Is it possible to backup a DOS partition (bootable) & restore it from a > > tar file? I recently had a disk failure & used dump/restore on FreeBSD > > partitions & made a tar dump of the DOS one. After "newfs_msdos" & "tar > > x", the partition is not bootable. Is there a way to do this? > > This is actually a really interesting issue. The short answer to this > question is, "no." The long answer is, "I don't really know. Maybe." >
I now know how to make this work. And it was a long strange journey. First, when I did "fdisk" & "newfs_msdos" from FreeBSD, neither my W98 SE distribution CD, nor my "Gateway Restore" CD would recognize the drive! (Hardware error, no drive C found.) Then when I delete all partitions, the W98 distribution disk would format the drive & install the OS, but FreeBSD would freeze during the un-tar. (Same result, 2 tries.) I was completely successful when I used the boot CD that came with the Seagate drive (downloadable from http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html). The "fdisk" and "format" on that CD allowed me to partition and format for W98. I created a bootable floppy which allowed my to "sys" the new C drive. The W98 was bootable. And the "tar" restore from FreeBSD worked fine. My conclusion: The FreeBSD fdisk + newfs_msdos seem to be buggy with regard to creating a primary DOS partition. The seagate tool + bootable W98 floppy allowed me to create bootable W98 partition. The tarfile restored the data. Your mileage may vary as I'm not a very good judge of when W98 is working properly. _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"