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Re: The Fine Art of Making a Bootable Drive



"Martin G. McCormick" <martin@server1.shellworld.net> writes:
 
    Copy MBR only of a hard drive:
    dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=446 count=1
 
 	The last 64 bits of the 512 mbr contain partition
 information and this is where I may be all wet. I thought the
 disk-copy process took care of that but if not, this is why my
 new disk just sits there when it is installed. The old disk
 boots with no problem.
 	

A much better way is to use the makefs utility.
https://packages.debian.org/squeeze/makefs
http://linux.die.net/man/8/mkfs

You can create a directory tree in your /home folder and then use
makefs with the 'bootimage' option or one of the several other
boot options.  After the image is created use dd to copy it to your
flash drive...  This has the really big advantage of being able to
directly customize, control, and recreate the content of the bootable
image on the fly.

Andrew


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