dd if=hda1 of=whatever ???????

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2008-10-03 at 17:02 -0700, mike havens wrote:
> what do I copy to copy the MBR.... If I remember correctly it is track
> zero. dd  if=hda1...
> how do I tell it which byte to start on and where to end and how do I
> figure this on the hd being copied?
> 
> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 1:13 PM, mike havens <bmike1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > dd if=hda1 bs=<?> of=windows<date> bs=<?>
> > what about the byte size thing? How should I figure that out; or do I
> > need to worry about it?
> > I was planning on copying to a cd but I think it would be a neat thing
> > to copy different images to the same disk. I looked for but had
> > problems  finding the compression option. Would you explain it to me?
----
as a general rule, the first 446 bytes of the hard drive are the mbr and
the remaining bytes to 512 are the partition info so in general, to back
that up...

dd if=/dev/hda of=SOME_TARGET_EVEN_A_FILE bs=446 count=1

would backup the mbr
and

dd if=/dev/hda of=SOME_TARGET bs=512 count=1

would also get the partition information

Craig