On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Word Wizard <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I used 'dd' to backup the MBR of my primary hard disk thus:
>
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/disk/sda.boot.mbr bs=512 count=1
>
> Upon restore I should have received:
>
> /dev/sda1   *           1         996     8000338+  82  Linux swap /
> Solaris
> /dev/sda2             997       14593   109217902+   5  Extended
> /dev/sda5             997        1002       48163+  83  Linux  (/boot)
> /dev/sda6            1003        3492    20000893+  83  Linux (/)
> /dev/sda7            3493       14593    89168751   83  Linux (/home)
>
> Instead the dd restore omitted the swap area. Is this normal? It seems
> to me that one cannot replicate a hard disk Linux installation without
> an exact replication of the original disk geography. Is this correct?
The MBR is one piece but the disk partitions are the other part that
is straight from /dev/sda.
Since you are using standard partitioning (not LVM) you can use
something like this
to backup the partition table (extracted from the sfdisk man page):
sfdisk /dev/sda -O sda-partition-sectors.save

>
> I backed up and restored on an unmounted device from the Ubuntu Live
> DVD. Could that have caused the problem? I now perform the same sequence
> on a mounted device from single-user mode (init 1). Should that make a
> difference?
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