dd'ing a Win2K drive - Should this work?

Jason Stephenson jason at sigio.com
Tue May 6 15:20:30 EDT 2003


pll at lanminds.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> System Specs:   Dell 2650 server w/ 2GB of main memory,
>                 5 removable SCSI drives.
> 
> Win2K is installed on /dev/sdc, Linux on /dev/sda.  There is no 
> master boot loader in the sense that Lilo is installed on /dev/sda, 
> but only deals with /dev/sda.  If Win2K is required, the Bios is 
> fiddled with in order to boot directly off that drive.
> 
> Should I be able to:
> 
> 	dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sdd

Yes, but that only works 100% if /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd are exactly the 
same size, i.e. same model drive from the same manufacturer. If /dev/sdd 
is bigger, it should still work, but you'll have wasted space as the end.

> 
> And then expect to be able to boot off of /dev/sdd OR move /dev/sdd 
> to /dev/sdc's slot and boot from that and actually have it work?

Don't know if you'd be able to boot from /dev/sdd or not after dd'ing, 
but in theory you should be able to. It's a bit for bit copy.

> This was tried, but supposedly the new drive would not boot 
> regardless of which slot it was in (I wasn't there, so I don't know 
> what was done).
> 
> I know next to nothing of how Win2K works, so I don't know if this is 
> even a realistic idea.  Since it was reported to me that it failed, 
> I'm guessing there is some registry setting or something somewhere which 
> keeps track of drive data or something.
> 
> Has anyone done this before?  What were your results?

Win2K doesn't like to boot unless its on the first BIOS drive. It 
probably was not installed on the first drive in the BIOS. Shameless 
Self Promotion: See here for some info. on this: 
http://www.sigio.com/articles/win2k.html. As mentioned in that article, 
I highly recommend using grub in these situations since it can fake the 
BIOS out without you actually having to change your BIOS.

AFAIK, there's no registry setting to track drives for booting. After 
all, the registry can't be loaded until after the boot sequence.





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