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!
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.
Thank you very much!
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 =)