Rob Wultsch said:
> Howdy. I need to copy a windows 98 install to a small hard drive. :(
> Basically all I am concerned about is that I am not sure which dd
> command I shoould use to copy over the boot loader thing which boot
> windows.
>
> Assuming that the larger (origingal) disk is hda and the new (smaller)
> disk is hdb and all the normal files have been copied over what is the
> dd command I need to use?
The boot process starts at LBA 0 which is the Master Boot Record (MBR).
The command to copy that block would be:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1
HOWEVER, the MBR contains partition information too. By default the
larger hard drive will have different partition information than the
smaller one will. If you execute the above command, you will wipe out the
primary partition tables on the small disk with the tables on the large
disk. I assume you don't want to do that.
Plus, the actual boot code is not in the MBR but is located elsewhere.
The elsewhere can be different for depending on the drive capacity and the
partitioning scheme.
So, I think you need to explain a bit more about what you have done to
reach this point.
In the past I have done this sort of process differently:
- Install Win98 from CD fresh on the new hard drive. Make sure it boots
clean when you are done.
- Connect the old hard drive as the slave.
- Now copy all the files from the old drive to the new, using filesystem
commands from a bootable Linux CD.
This moves all the data and programs while maintaining any possibly unique
configurations that the new drive now contains in it's boot and partition
information. The drawback is doing a full Win98 install but I haven't
bothered to learn any tricks around that.
Alan
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