Dwight Tovey wrote:
On Tue, 2007-01-16 at 14:14 +1100, James Harper wrote:
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.
Ok. I guess it's just been a long time since I've worked with M$ boot
loaders, so I don't understand how they work anymore. I went ahead and
did a restore using bartpe, and like you said, it 'just worked'. That
still leaves me a little nervous though. I tried basically the same
process on a different machine except that I deleted/recreated the
partition first. After formatting/restoring, it refused to come up:
acted like it couldn't find the boot loader. I had to dig out a Windows
install CD and let it go through the process of installing up to the
first reboot, then booted from bartpe to continue. However, I didn't
mark the partition as active (forgot about that), so maybe that is a
required step still. If I get a chance I'll have to play around with it
some more to see what happens.
Thanks again.
/dwight
Having a partition marked active is still a requirement to boot (IIRC), at
least up to Windows XP. I expect Vista to also have this issue. It isn't
Windows that controls boot-up, just the system BIOS.
Linux can install a boot-loader in either the MBR or the active partition,
Windows uses a standard MBR and a boot-loader in the active partition. (At
least on the systems I've worked on recently! YMMV, and other acronyms 8) )
--Grant
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