Re: Windows, alas!
hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
>
> Do you happen to know just what has to be backed up to be able to restore Windows fron
> backup and even have it boot? Every time I've tried it with the current crop of
> Windowses just copying all the files (using Linux tar) and running lilo hasn't sufficed.
> There seems to be some essential information outside the file system, as far as I can see.
>
> I mamaged to do this long ago with Windows 98 SE, but as far as I know that time the boot
> information had not been damaged between restores, so if there was any extra covert data,
> it was still there..
>
> -- hendrik
>
>
Greetings Hendrik:
It's not a matter of there being data outside of the filesystem with
NT-based Windows systems, it's a matter of improper mapping of
permissions and metadata between Linux & Windows. If you mount a
Windows NTFS partition from Linux, you will see that the files are all
owned by root (or whomever mounted the partition), which is not what
would show up if you looked at it under Windows. The tar program
maintains those (wrong) permissions, and then writes them back.
You might be able to get away with using tar to back up a Windows
partition IF the partition is FAT32 rather than NTFS - which is why it
worked under Win98 but not now. Pretty much everything ships NTFS now.
If you want to back up the Windows partition from Linux, you need to do
it at a bit level rather than a file level. Using dd works, and you can
feed that through bzip to compress it, if space is an issue.
Good luck.
-Scott
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