My new laptop came with Vista, and a recovery partition. I'm going to wipe them out and install Linux. But I want to backup the recovery partition first, just in case I need it later to send it in for warranty services or something.
The recovery partition is ~10GB. I usually wouldn't mind having that sitting on my harddrive... but it's a 80GB SSD, and space is scarce.
Just to make sure, can I back it up using dd like this? (assuming the SSD is at /dev/sda, and the recovery partition /dev/sda1)
Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=partition_table skip=446 count=64
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=recovery_partition bs=4M
According to Wikipedia, the partition table starts at 446 offset, and is 64 bytes long.
Master boot record - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and to restore
Code:
dd if=partition_table seek=446 count=64
#reboot
dd if=recovery_partition of=/dev/sda1 bs=4M
Thanks