Quote:
Originally Posted by jefro
In all this I get the feeling that you put grub on the partition in question maybe?
|
That could maybe have something to do with why restoring the image of the /dev/sda1 partition containing Bodhi Linux complete with /boot/grub also restored the MBR
But that wouldn't account for why restoring the FreeDOS partition, /dev/sda3 also overwrote the MBR...
While I'm no expert with what really happens when FreeDOS's installer writes "FreeDOS specific" data to what it calls the bootsector or "Volume Boot Record", but the functional effect was the same as when a Linux installs it's bootloader to the 1st superblock of the "/" partition, in that to boot with it one "chainloads" the partition from a bootloader that is installed to the MBR... Which is how most of my Linux are installed on the three other computers where I'd like to use something like clonzilla. And if the actual MBR gets overwritten when restoring a Linux partition containing a grub or grub2 that was installed to it's own "/" partition like what happend with my FreeDOS partition, I'll go nutz with it...
Quote:
Originally Posted by jefro
Not too many other people have issues with this. Most people in fact do not copy the mbr and get into trouble.
|
Yeah. I noticed that. Of course, it's hard to think of a Linux Distro that doesn't have at least one how-to link for restoring grub and/or grub2 to the MBR with a live/rescue cd/dvd. Though I imagine that forgetting to backup the MBR could be seriously problematic for someone using a "windows" bootloader.
BTW
if they would also include a menu choice to skip restoring the MBR when restoring
partition images, I'd be in favor of clonezilla always assuming the MBR should be preserved even when saving individual partition images.
Likewise I think it would have been a nice touch if there was a menu choice to save and/or restore ONLY the MBR without the user needing to understand the syntax of the dd command line.
At this point I'm thinking that I'm going to have to do some empirical testing to find out if I can get consistent results.
To do that, I think I should maybe clone my desktops entire hard drive, so that I will be able to repair any damage that may occur when I make/restore partition clones of various individual partitions. Including at least one that includes a grub that's installed to it's own "/" partition, plus my actual separate boot partition containing my manually maintained grub legacy. I'd also include the FreeDOS partition that I installed there as well, to test if perhaps it's something odd about how FreeDOS's partition bootsector is written that caused the undesirable clonezilla behavior. And, I think, at least one data partition containing no boot loader files at all...
Then I'd have to restore them repetitively in various order to see which, if any, mess with the MBR, as well as which, if any, lose the ability to be chainloaded from my grub menu. (I'm hoping that it was just a fluke when restoring the Freedos partition resulted in both an trashed MBR and a copy of FreeDOS that couldn't be chainloaded...)
This testing might have to wait till my limited resources can spring for a new USB drive however, as I doubt the one I've got has enough free space for all those image files at once...
By the way, I've read that clonezilla images can be restored to a larger partition than they were saved from. But I'm not sure if restoring a 10 gig partition onto a 15 gig target partition would waste 5 gigs of drive space? Which would be OK if qparted would be able to see the difference, and therefore resize the new partition to fill up it's available space?