[Cialug] Cloning FAT32 secret?

[L. V. Lammert]

At 07:03 PM 7/16/2010, you wrote:

> > In addition, dd'ing the [466b] MBR DNW
>
>dd works fine. There's nothing magic about FAT file systems that 
>breaks bit-wise copies.
>
>I'm not sure what you mean by "466 b", but based on that and your 
>"fdisk sees junk" comments I'm guessing you didn't correctly copy 
>the partition map.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

The article shows the reason for 466b  - this is the 'code area' 
specifically for the MBR (+ disk signature + 0x0000). When copying 
the MBR, that avoids borking the partition table on the new disk.

>The MBR is 512 B long and the actual partition map is 64 B starting 
>at 0x1BE. If you plan to boot directly you need the first 440 B for 
>the bootloader, and you definitely need the final 66 bytes to get 
>the partition map and magic number, so unless there's some good 
>reason to avoid it I'd just copy the whole thing.

Tried that the first few times, ... never could create a bootable 
partition. Even when booting from a Win98 CD, Windoze refused to see 
a valid partition, so I had to assume that something was just funky 
with FAT32/FAT32LBA

>Or if you're lazy you can just dd the entire disk instead of the 
>specific partition.

Tried that on the last test (at least the active partition, as the 
entire disk would not fit - 40GB vs. 32GB), .. but no combination of 
techniques would ever product a bootable disk, in fact, most did not 
even product a bootable *partition* [even though marked bootable in 
the partition table] as GAG did not recognize as bootable.

It sounds like Clonezilla might work, .. but I ended up using 
something called "EZ Gig" that I borrowed for the occasion.

         TFTR!

         Lee