Restore contents of ddrescue image without overwriting MBR, possible?
Hi,
I have the following question but I lack a bit in knowledge. From what I understand it could be possible:
I have a dual boot setup (Ubuntu for everything and Win7 for audio/studio work). My hard-drive had a few bad sectors which affected specifically the ability of the W7 partition to boot up. Ubuntu was happy. So, as the SMART tests and also the manufacturer's Seatools say the drive is healthy with some bad sectors (the critical threshold has not been reached and it does not seem to be spreading, also no dying sounds from he drive) I decided to rescue what I could from the Win partition and "destructively erase" (as they happen to call it) the whole drive with the manufacturer's tools (which, as they suggest, may help relocate the bad blocks and leave us happy for a few more years)
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My new 14.04 is happily up and running. However, I would like to recover the whole contents of the image of the Win7 disk to the 1st primary partition of the drive where a new useless Win7 sits (sp there is a woring bootable "slot" - other solutions did not work and this was recommended on some forums).
Why? Because a lot of work has gone into tweaking the system so that it would not have any hickups, no processes or drivers running to interfere with live recording, low latency etc - a very nutered setup unsuitable for other work - it also almost never connects to the web. So, ideally, it is not just a matter of reinstalling stuff and copying the files I work with. I would like the whole complex setup back.
Ddrescue rescued smth like 99% of the drive and there were errors reported in some audio banks, which is irrelevant at this point. One problem - previously the windows partition was partition #3. And I already tried to recover it to partition #2 before the clean install once, just for testing. I ended up with an unbootable Win system with files in place and the partition mountable through ubuntu, though.
I understand that if I could bytecopy the contents of the image file to the new Win partition *without* wiping out its bootup data this could actually work... May I be right?
Can we do that? How? I would assume I would have to tell dd to skip some 512 bytes in the beginning of the image, perhaps... Or is one just dreaming and should get ready for sleepless nights of reconfiguring?
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Do it with others, it's a club."
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