Backup whole hard drive solution
 

Howdy?I have the following question and want to find out the solution. :) Please help.

Background:
Firstly,I would like to introduce my hard drive partition.

Today,I nearly killed my hard drive by using Ghost 2003 under Windows XP.After I rebooted,Ghost performed a whole disk backup.However,it was unsuccessful and said "No boot Operating System".I figured it out that Ghost created a Virtual partition to perform backup.The whole hard disk name were changed.So I can't get my GRUB back before I saved it in rescue mode.

Questions:
1.I would like to perform a whole disk backup before I have such a terrible nightmare when I perform backup.Other than Norton Ghost 2003,can I use Mondo to accomplish this?

2.If I want to change Hda6 to disk format EXT3,can I do it under Linux using fdisk?Any risk to my system?Under Windows XP,I have done it with Partition Magic but it complained there are some errors.What can I do?

Do you have any suggestion?Because I found it very dangerous to play with the partition table.....This few days I have been into the situation that I went to rescue mode and save my grub again and again. :(

"1.I would like to perform a whole disk backup before I have such a terrible nightmare when I perform backup.Other than Norton Ghost 2003,can I use Mondo to accomplish this?"

Yes. Mondo is a good backup system. I do not know if it can handle Windows file systems. You may have to use Mondo for Linux and some Windows backup system for Windows.

"2.If I want to change Hda6 to disk format EXT3,can I do it under Linux using fdisk?Any risk to my system?Under Windows XP,I have done it with Partition Magic but it complained there are some errors.What can I do?"

You do not use fdisk to format partitions. First make sure that the partition is umounted. Then format it with mkfs:
umount /dev/hda6
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda6

See:
man mkfs

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