Even if you have only one volume, your hard disk is divided into partitions. The standard MSDOS volume 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, primary 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 logical partitions will appear 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.
We will save all the partitions entries (both primary and logical 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. Ideally you want to have multiple copies in different locations.
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.