Re: dd to backup fat32 drive?

hazzmat wrote:

> Sorry I can't find really definite answers through google so I'm going to
> demonstrate my ignorance here.
> I know a little about Linux, but I don't know jack about Windows.
> I have someone I do network and general tech support for in an amateur
> sense, and her laptop harddrive which is installed with WindowsXP on a
> fat32 drive is starting to flake out. It appears to be electrical but
> that's a very rough guess--scandisk shows no errors but sometimes the
> Windows system reboots to a black screen and the BIOS may report an
> error message '200 Error fixed disk 0' It requires the battery to be
> removed to reset it fully then.
>
> She has data backups to the Linux router
> and raid 1 samba server I made for her from an ancient desktop. Her data
> is safe, but she needs a new harddrive, it seems. If she has to have a new
> harddrive it means all her OS and applications have to be reinstalled
> unless the old drive can be imaged before it goes. It's in a laptop so
> hooking up a new 2.5" drive would be difficult. I happen to have from an
> old project an 2.5" to 3.5" harddrive ATA cable adapter, which could be
> used to manipulate the laptop drive from a regular PC and to transfer the
> Windows partition to a new 2.5" drive. Can I dd the C drive Fat32
> formatted from the laptop to an outfile (eg, drivec.img) on one of the
> PC's ext3 formatted harddrives, and then reverse that from the drivec.img
> outfile to a new 2.5" harddrive with one large fat32 partition on it, and
> will the new drive boot?
> I don't have two laptop->3.5" ata adapters and if i do this I need to do
> it very soon, so I'm not looking to buy a second adapter. But with one
> adapter I can't make a straight transfer from one laptop drive to another,
> there would have to be an intermediate stage where the partition data is
> stored to a normal harddrive which would probably have ext3 or reiserfs on
> it. Is this going to work?
>

Yes.

# backup: dd if=/dev/<partitionwithdata> of=<imagefile>
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=mydata.img
# restore:
dd if=mydata.img of=/dev/hda2

# the entire drive including boot sector
dd if=/dev/hda of=diskimage.img

# You can also use tar
tar -cpvf <imagefile>.tar <root path of data>
# c- create p- preserve permissions v- verbose f- file

FYI: With two machines, you can use netcat to send data directly with a
similar process.

.

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