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i have a master drive and a slave drive. my slave is getting pretty old and i really have no use for it...so i was wondering, if i were to go to windows explorer and copy everything from (master) C:\ to D:\, would i then be ablee to pull out the master, configure the slave to be the master (and only harddrive), and then fdisk /mbr on it to make it run as normal...
i ask more for understanding than practicality, but this may be useful to know if i have to restore my system some day...
No, I doubt Explorer would correctly copy everything. There are programs that do that, though.
It wouldn't work as you suggest because more than likely the contents of your current slave reside on the boot partition of the drive. So forcing the new content to that position is nearly impossible. Although, I'm sure there are programs out there that do it, like CornedBee said, but I wouldn't trust them.
how would you suggest backing EVERYTHING up? Currently the only drive i have that's big enough is the slave drive. If i have to restore my system i don't want to have to deal with re-installing programs, re-organizing the start menu, telling that stupid little tutor guy to go away, etc.. I have spent a long long time getting my computer exactly how i want it...I basically just want a copy of what i've got now.
i figured out how i'm going to do this, but what *nix program do i use to make a disk image?
dd? ;)
In theory, dd should suffice, not sure about practice, though.
yea, i finally remembered about dd after posting this
i tried it too.....but half way through i realized it was going to try to copy 60 gigs onto a 30 gig drive....all i need is about 15 gigs out of the 60 though
i guess i could re-partition the windows partition to 15 gigs, copy the image of that, and then copy the image of hda...
...but then how would i write the two back seemlessly?...or does the FAT for a partition reside on the partition?...if so i wouldn't really need to make an image of hda, just hda1
(not bumping posts...mine's the first one on the list..i just keep thinking of things)
does this sound like it would work:
backup:
re-partition windows to 16 gigs
create image of first 3(?) sectors (bootsector and FAT) - bs.img
create and image of hda1 - windows.img
store the last 2 files on hdB1
restore:
(zero out hda)?
write bs.img to hda
write windows.img to sector 4(?) of hda
why use 2 images you ask?...because i can't use dd to copy only 15 non-sequential gigs...but i can use dd to copy only a partition ...which is good, but it will leave out the FAT. so i must create another image with the fat, which i can do because i can copy from sector a to sector b with dd and the bootsector and FAT are a fixed size. it will take careful alignment, but i think i can do it...
(btw way, i love overcomplicating things)