dd and MBR

[jozien]

I used dd to clone the XP c:\ drive and want to use dd
to restore XP on a new drive.
Will dd copy the MBR to the new drive?

jozien

[twistero]

What's the exact command you used for backup?

[jozien]

What's the exact command you used for backup?

I used:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1

jozien

[twistero]

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1

Well, then you only copied the first partition of the hard drive, not the MBR, because the MBR is not part of any partition. You'll have to do something like

dd if=sda of=sdb

i.e. copying the entire drive, to clone the MBR. If you know exactly how long the MBR is, you can use the "bs" and "count" arguments of dd to selectively clone the MBR only.

However, if you still have the source drive, I suggest using a "smarter" cloning tool like Clonezilla, which is also free and open source.