[selfnote] Cloning/Backing up NTFS systems

For some reasons, you may need to clone/backup NTFS based systems. Lets say your NTFS system is located at /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 is a spare partition where you can store your image.

At first you need to boot a live system to take an image:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd bs=512 count=1 if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr
ntfsclone -s -o – /dev/sda1 | bzip2 -9 -c > \
/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2

To restore the image you just need:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd count=1 bs=446 if=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr of=/dev/sda
cat /mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2 | bunzip2 -c | \
ntfsclone -r -O /dev/sda1 -

P.S. If you are elective in germany, have a look at this!

Creative Commons License
The [selfnote] Cloning/Backing up NTFS systems by Cyconet Blog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at blog.waja.info.

3 Responses to “[selfnote] Cloning/Backing up NTFS systems”


  • That’s nice, but has anyone solved the problem, what happens when the image is restored onto a almost similar machine with slightly different partitioning? After doing that, the system residing on NTFS won’t start anymore without manual intervention.

  • And of course, if you’ve been following along for a week or two, you know
    that this (BING!) is a Useless Use of Cat!

    Rememeber, nearly all cases where you have:

    cat file | some_command and its args …

    you can rewrite it as:

    <file some_command and its args …

    and in some cases, such as this one, you can move the filename
    to the arglist as in:

    some_command and its args … file

    http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html
    … Sorry, couldn't resist =)

Leave a Reply


Too Cool for Internet Explorer