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Bare Metal Recovery, Revisited

Issue 100

From Issue #100
August 2002

Jul 31, 2002  By Charles Curley
 in
Charles describes the additions he made to the scripts for his backup and recovery suite.
Using the Script

The script make.fdisk should be run as a normal part of preparing for backing up for bare metal recovery. Run it before you run save.metadata so that the output files are saved to the ZIP drive. Better yet, have save.metadata call it, once for each hard drive.

When you are restoring, run make.dev.x for each hard drive you have. Again, this can be automated by including it in restore.metadata.

There are other things you can do with this script. Suppose you want to add a new partition. Use the bare metal backup process to save a hard drive, then edit the dev.x command file to change the partition definitions and restore using the edited file. I successfully added a 30MB Mess-DOS partition to my test computer with this technique.

Improvements

Some improvements that you can tackle if you like include having make.fdisk process several hard drives, all indicated on the command line; adding error checking for the argument(s) to make.fdisk, having it produce one script that builds all the hard drives, extending the FAT filesystem support (for one thing, right now the code ignores FAT32); and extending the code to support other filesystems.

Resources

Charles Curley (w3.trib.com/~ccurley) is a freelance software engineer, writer and occasional cowpoke in the wilds of Wyoming. Occasionally, while he's in his backyard working on an article, some deer wander through and he loses his train of thought.

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