> Ok, this isn't exactly a Bacula issue, but Bacula is involved in our > recovery system so I hope you all will forgive the transgression. > > Is it possible to do bare-metal recovery of a Windows system without > booting from the Windows CD to install the boot loader? I've created a > BartPE boot disk with the bacula module and that works great for > restoring the files from the Bacula server, but I don't see a way to > install a boot loader onto the hard disk from there. I'll be the first > to admit that I don't know much about Windows (that's a good thing isn't > it?) so maybe I'm just missing something simple?
As long as you: . format the drive with windows (or a reasonable recent version of mkntfs) . restore the necessary stuff (ntldr, boot.ini, etc) . make sure the mbr is correct (fdisk /mbr back in the old days, can't remember how to do it under bartpe) . mark the partition as active (not sure if this is actually required) You should get a bootable system. In fact I have successfully restored an XP system from Linux before using ntfs-3g, although it doesn't restore the acls etc. Every ntfs format you do under windows (I'm pretty sure anyway) will give you a filesystem with a bootloader in it. This surprised me last time I did it... I formatted the disk under bartpe, restored my stuff, and then couldn't figure out the last step I needed to actually make it bootable, but when I tried to boot it it 'just worked'. If you do need fixboot or fixmbr from the windows install cd's 'recovery mode' then I don't know of a way to get around it... you can use Linux (ms-sys) or DOS (fdisk /mbr) to restore the mbr, but I don't know about repairing the bootsector... well actually I do... you can use some 'dd' trickiness to do it but that's a tricky path to navigate. James ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
