Can You Copy The Boot Sector Of A Disc?

[hsncorrosion]

Is there any possible ways at all to copy an entire disc including the boot sector to another disc?

[VaKo]

Yes, there is a little program called dd, which allows you to produce a exact bit for bit copy using a simple command like dd if=/*source* of=/*destination*. Runs under *nix or windows (take a look at my linux-esq command line for windows post).

edit: if your using it for windows you will need to change the SID, either with sysprep or the sysinternal app called newSID.

[hsncorrosion]

ok yes windows xp home.....

And what must I change the ssid to?

EDIT

I have only one drive to burn with so what command line would I use?

(Drive E)

[Sparda]

you want to burn a disk image to DVDs?

[VaKo]

Using a linux boot disc would probally be easier for you, so download one.

Then you id which disc your source is, say /sda, and your target, say /hda, enter dd if=/sda of=/hda and wait. (There are other options to increase i/o speed, read the man pages). You can't put an 80gb disc on a 40gb disc, but you can put a 40gb disc on an 80gb disc.

Newsid has an option to generate a random sid, use that. Sysprep is a must if your going to run on different hardware though.

[SomeoneE1se]

Using a linux boot disc would probally be easier for you, so download one.

Then you id which disc your source is, say /sda, and your target, say /hda, enter dd if=/sda of=/hda and wait. (There are other options to increase i/o speed, read the man pages). You can't put an 80gb disc on a 40gb disc, but you can put a 40gb disc on an 80gb disc.

Newsid has an option to generate a random sid, use that. Sysprep is a must if your going to run on different hardware though.

you 'can' if you pipe it to a compression program and then out and there's less then * amount of data and the rest is zero'd

[VaKo]

Yes, but a compressed image won't boot if you stick the disk in another machine. To the best of my knowledge you can simple use the compressed image to deploy to another disc with another round of dd. If there is a lot of blank space it would be quicker to shrink the partition to fit on the smaller disc before running dd. For backups though, piping it to a compression utility would work fine.

[hsncorrosion]

ok thanks i'll give it a shot

[deleted]

Acronis TrueImage?

Theres a free trial on their its.

And the amount of times I have seen it on Cover disks.