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In our business there are times that you have to work with windows boxes.
The main problem with that is that they are constantly broken.
So is there a efficient way to build a proper backup image ?
The answer is YES, by using SystemRescueCd and ntfsclone
For this example lets say that our primary disk is /dev/sda
and our backup disk is: /dev/sdb
(in the real world, my windows disk is a lvm partition)
Boot your SystemRescue CD or USB
easy peasy
Verify your disks
eg. fdisk -l
| Device | Boot | Start | End | Blocks | Id | System |
| /dev/sda1 | * | 63 | 10458314 | 5229126 | 7 | HPFS/NTFS/exFAT |
| /dev/sdb1 | 2048 | 10485759 | 5241856 | 83 | Linux |
Be careful
ntfsresize --info /dev/sda1
The result of the above command will determine the next step.
If there are errors, you must reboot to windows and check your disk, defragment or what ever process you must run to fix your disk.
Backup MBR and Partition Table
You should/must take backup of MBR (Master Boot Record) or even the boot loader using dd command
dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.mbr bs=512 count=1 dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.vbr bs=512 count=63
It is also a good idea to dump to a file your existing partition table:
sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sda.ptab
if you want to restore the partition table from your backup file:
sfdisk /dev/sda < sda.ptab
Perform Ntfs Clone
Mount your backup disk to an empty directory,
eg
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/custom/
and start ntfsclone
ntfsclone --save-image --output /mnt/custom/winxp.ntfsclone /dev/sda1
And simple wait for a minute or two (or ten or an hour – depends of the disk size).
Restore your ntfs clone backup
ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/sda1 /mnt/custom/winxp.ntfsclone