Hello --

I bought an Acer desktop with Vista Home Basic. This is a pre-installed image of Vista Basic -- that is, there is an OEM restore/imaging partition at the beginning of the hard drive.

There is no DVD which came with the computer (which sucks). At anytime I want to go back to factory settings, I just invoke this imager/partition at boot, and she images right back to "never fired up" status.

To do this, it overwrites the C: drive while re-imaging, and lays down Vista on that C: drive.

Now it's my understanding that Vista must be installed on an NTFS partition. Period.

Yet, very consistently, when I use any Linux-based LiveCD to look at fdisk, it shows me the following. Keep in mind, this is the partition where Vista resides:
/dev/sda2 boot ID=6 FAT16

This really surprises me. Why is it not ID=7 hpfs/ntfs ????????

Why does it matter? Because this causes big time grief for even commercial cloners and ghosters. It won't copy that partition. As I type, I am using Linux-based System Rescue LiveCD to implement a dd command for copying bit-by-bit, but I don't know what I'll get (if it will have worked) until later when I try to do a restore from my external drive.

Thanks for any guidance and understanding!

Hi,

And welcome to LQ!

The partition type doesn't actually impact on the file-system in use. And
if MS chose to use ID6 instead of 7 ... /me shrugs.



Cheers,
Tink

That's a good point. And thanks for the kind welcome!
The partition type does, however, seem to affect bootable cloners such as Western Digital's DataLife or whatever it's called. Because of this ID=6, I've been unable to get a copy of the Vista partition over to my external drive.
This is the reason I am trying Linux dd command. We'll see what happens.
Again, thank you!