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
--
Dwight Tovey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Work to Live : Live to Ride : Ride to Work
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