Save of a partition table (MBR)

Introduction to partitions

Even if you have only one volume, your hard disk is divided into
partitions. The standard MSDOS voulme label allows to have up to 4
primary partitions. The partition table is stored in the MBR (Master
Boot Record). This area is the first 512 bytes of the physical hard
drive. It also contain some code which will start the operating system,
which can be the bootloader (LILO, grub, ...). If your hard disk is
hda, parimary partitions are hda1, hda2, hda3 and hda4. It's easy to
save to primary partitions table, by copying the MBR.

To get past this limitation of 4 primary partitions, you can
create an extended partition. An extended partition is a primary
partition which contains a lot of partitions. For example, if hda2 is
an extended partition, its logicial partitions will lappear as hda5,
hda6, hda7, ... even if you don't use 4 primary partitions. That's why
you can have an hda5 device, with no hda4. The problem with extended
partition is there is no table we can easily save. The extended
partition contains a linked list. hda5 will point to hda6, hda6 will
point to hda7 and so on. This makes it difficult to save the partition
table of the extended partition.

Partimage can save the data of one partition, but it won't save
your partition table. If you have a major problem with your hard drive,
you may have to restore both the partition table and the data - having
the images of the partitions won't be a lot of help on there own. Which
is why we'll show you how to save the partition image now.

Making a backup of the partition entries

We will save all the partitions entries (both primary and logicial
ones which appear in the extended partition). In this example, we'll be
assuming that hda (the first IDE hard disk) is to be backed up.

First, we will save the MBR with DD (GNU convert and copy)

cd /root
mkdir partition-backup
cd partition-backup
dd if=/dev/hda of=backup-hda.mbr count=1 bs=512

It will produce a very small, but very important file: 512 bytes of data. Now, we will save entries of the extended partitions:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda > backup-hda.sf

sfdisk is a tool provided with the util-linux package.

IMPORTANT: You should now put these files somewhere safe
- copy them to a floppy disk (and take a copy of it!), or burn them
onto a CD. Keep these files safe. Do not leave them on your hard drive
- if there is a problem with th drive, you may not be able to access
these files, and while your partition images won't be wortheless, it
will certainly be a lot harder to restore your data.

Restoring partition entries from the backup

Be careful, restoring is a dangerous action - it can destroy data! First, we will restore the Master Boot Record:

dd if=backup-hda.mbr of=/dev/hda

Then, here is how to restore extended partitions entries:

sfdisk /dev/hda < backup-hda.sf

To finish, you will have to reboot your computer.

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