Iris

Iris is a Sharp PC-M4000 laptop

Linux on Iris

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

I need to be able to do a bare metal recovery should I lose the hard drive or completely mess up the system during conversion to dual boot. After exploring with Ubuntu booted from the live cd and reading info on the web I determined that I can safely trash the MBR (master boot record) and still recover the system using Grub (the GNU boot loader). To be confident that I can rebuild the system, I need to have

1. a copy of the recovery partition,
2. an XP backup in ASR format,
3. the ASR floppy disk files,
4. and an Ubuntu cd to re-install the Grub MBR.

Recovery partition backup

To do this, I booted from the Ubuntu 6.06 cdrom and used the dd command to create an image of the drive 'recovery' partition. The drive is partitioned like this:

  start  end   ID  filesystem      size 
1     1  7649  07  NTFS            61 GB  Drive C:
2  7650  9091  0f  W95             11 GB  Drive D:
3  9092  9729  de  "Dell Utility"  5 GB   This is the recovery partition
-
5  7650  9091  07  NTFS            Drive D: by another name

sda2 is empty so I am ignoring it; I will delete it when I install Ubuntu.

This is the command I used.

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

I tried 'zipping' the partition but found zip has a 4 GB size limit.

After backup I can use the 'file' command on the server. 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"

I should be able to boot a VMWare machine from it using a grub entry similar to this

unhide (hd0,2)
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader+1

These commands could be placed in a menu.lst grub file or entered on the command line at boot time. Since I intend to delete the partition now that it is backed up, I won't be keeping the entries in menu.lst.

ASR

The Windows XP Pro "Backup" command includes an option for an ASR (Automated System Recovery) backup. I opted to put the backup onto my Linux server via Samba, which worked fine right up until it asked me to insert a floppy. Iris does not have a flopppy drive. I briefly considered jumping on my bike and seeking out a USB floppy drive but this is silly. I never intend to USE the backup. It is just a safety net. I googled and found this:

http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/ASP/Windows-Server-Hacks-12-77-and-98/2/

"During the ASR backup process, you’re asked to insert a blank, formatted floppy to create a system recovery disk (commonly called an ASR floppy). This floppy is critical to the ASR restore process, so it’s worth digging a little deeper into how it’s used. The ASR backup process saves two files onto your floppy: the ASR state file ( asr.sif), which contains information about the disk signatures and configuration of disk volumes on your machine, and asrpnp.sif, which contains information about different Plug and Play devices on your system. These two files are critical for the recovery of your system, because they connect the underlying hardware configuration with the operating system above it. As we’ll see in a moment, you need to insert this floppy at the beginning of the ASR restore, in order to rebuild the disk subsystem and hardware configuration of your system before restoring the contents of the system and boot volumes.

"What if you have no floppy disk drive on your machine? Fortunately, you can still use ASR to back up your system, but its a bit of a workaround. During the ASR backup process copies of these asr.sif and asrpnp.sif files are also saved in the %SystemRoot%\Repair folder on your server. So, when you receive a prompt at the end of the backup process to insert a floppy, simply ignore the prompt and instead copy asr.sif and asrpnp.sif from Repair to a network share on another server (one that has a floppy disk drive installed). Then, copy the files from the share on that server to a blank floppy you insert into its drive, and you now have a working ASR floppy for your backup. Then, go buy a USB external floppy drive, because you’ll need it if you ever have to rebuild your original server from the backup set you created. In other words, you can perform ASR backup without a floppy, but you cannot perform an ASR restore without one."

I have saved copies of these little files.

I can boot from Ubuntu but would still be more comfortable with an XP boot cd. I refuse to get bent out of shape about this though. I can really live without XP on the laptop if I were to lose it. And I am now relatively confident that I can do a bare metal restore should it be necessary. I would have to first restore the recovery partition from the backup on Bread using Ubuntu, then boot from it. This would allow restoring a bootable copy of XP, which could then be used to run the ASR restore. I'd be back in business then.

The onlye truly inconvenient part would be having to shell out for a USB floppy drive at that point to load up the asr files. I will deal with that if it ever happens.

Links

Fedora on the M4000