Iris

Iris is a Sharp PC-M4000 laptop

She came with XP Pro installed. I spent a few evenings playing with it, updating it and installing Firefox and ArcMap and so on. Now I want to start serious work so I need to install Linux on the machine. I want the system to be dual boot.

Backups

Right now I am using Linux to create a backup image before installing Ubuntu. I booted from the Ubuntu 6.06 cdrom and will use the dd command to create images of the drive partitions.

It has 4 partitions.

1    1 7649 07  NTFS            61 GB  Drive C:
2 7650 9091 0f  W95             11 GB  Drive D:
3 9092 9729 de  "Dell Utility"  1/2 GB
-
5 7650 9091 07  NTFS            Drive D: by another name

I presume that the third partition is the recovery partition. No need to back up sda2 as it is completely empty.

How not to back up large partitions

This does not work because zip has a 4gb limit. Everything proceeds just fine until 4 gb have been passed over the pipe. Then zip quits.

dd if=/dev/sda1 | zip | ssh -l root bread 'cat /home/backups/iris_sda1.zip' 
...repeat for /dev/sda3

I can skip the zip on the recovery partion and just do

dd if=/dev/sda3| ssh -l root bread 'cat /home/backups/iris_sda3'

This is interesting:

file iris_sda3 
iris_sda3: x86 boot sector, code offset 0x58, OEM-ID "MSWIN4.1", sectors/cluster 8, Media descriptor 0xf8, heads 255, hidden sectors 146046915, sectors 10249470 (volumes > 32 MB) , FAT (32 bit), sectors/FAT 9994, rootdir cluster 91, reserved3 0x800000, serial number 0x3d40315d, label: "  PQSERVICE"

Using 'dd' is clumsy but should make it possible to bring the machine back to its original state. I should be able to safely remove the recovery partition. To be on the safe side I will also burn the recovery partition to a CD.

I will also backup the MBR just in case it has weird stuff in it. I suspect it puts the "Press F10 to Recover" message on the screen.

To test each image, I should be able to unzip the image and boot a VMWare machine from it using a grub entry similar to this

unhide (hdX,Y)
rootnoverify (hdX,Y)
chainloader+1

I will try this with the recovery partition but I am unwilling to go quite this far with the full C: image... I think... maybe I am. It would be an interesting experiment...