lostcause
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Posted: Nov. 25 2005,04:41 |
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Ranish Partition Manager (here out referred to as RPM) might be what you're looking for. If "backing up and restoring linux boot partitions" is a attempt to get around the "4 primary partition limit" of the harddrive, then it's definitely your solution. I've been using it for about 6 or 7 years and, in my opinion, it's one of the best FREEWARE utilities out there! It allows for up to 32 bootable partitions per drive... or more than any sane person could deal with... whichever comes first. One of my PC's is currently setup to boot from one of seven OS's, each, on it's own partition (six are on the first hd). There are also four non-bootable data partitions and one swap partition... that's 12 partitions spread out across 4 drives... about 300 gigs worth with 180 gigs or so of free space... . In truth, only three are used extensively. The others are available but used less often. It works by creating a "sudo" partition table and storing it in its own partition. That partition need only take up one complete cylinder (about 8K in my case) and is typically placed in the last complete cylinder of each drive. You select which partitions you want placed in the MBR and assign them a number (1-4) for each drive. Upon booting, any partition that is not set as hidden will be available for boot and will automatically be assigned as partition 1 on that drives MBR. It will appear as the the C volume in DOS/Win or as hda1,hdb1,... hdf1...and so on with linux. I recommend booting Windows only from the primary/master. Linux isn't so touchy and can be started from any disc... go figure, right. The rest of the partitions appear as D, E, X, hda2, hdb5, hdf3... and so on. Partitions can be selected to boot automatically or you may select from a menu on startup. You only need to have one swap partition, different linux distos can share the same one. I recommend placing it as the first partition on the last disc. With exception to the swap partition, I also recommend placing bootable partitions toward the beginning of a drive and non-bootable ones toward the end... with free space in the middle. All of this might sound a bit troublesome... even dangerous to some, but once you get a handle on RPM's interface it's a breeze. The most difficult part for me was deciding the most efficient partition layout, the key rules of which are described above. The only catch is that you may need to blow away existing partitions and start from scratch, unless you have sufficient free space available. Also, other disc partition utilities such as fdisk (DOS and linux) cfdisk, hdparm, etc... should NOT be used to partition drives or make changes to the partition table... do all partitioning and configuration with RPM. The other utilities may be used to view the partition table, but keep in mind that partitions that are not assigned an number in the MBR will appear as free space, and therein lies the danger of using them. One last thing... you don't have to, but if the RPM Boot Manager partition is assigned as number 4 in the MBR, the partition table can be restored IF it is lost (WHEN it's lost in the case of "post" Windows ME installs). When installing a Linux distro, always place lilo or grub in the root partition, not the MBR. Older Damn Small hd installs (maybe newer ones too) automatically write to the MBR. Use RPM's boot partition restoration ability, boot again with the DSL cd, edit lilo.conf, and run liloconfig to place lilo in the DSL root partition. If you don't have the RPM boot manager partition assigned as partition 4 in the MBR it is overwritten, all may not be lost if you have a hard copy printed out. You'll have to key in a lot of info bit it beats reinstalling a ton of OS's. Below is a sample table. Some info is omitted for reasons of screen width. This is not the boot menu... just a copy of the table. The columns are a little crooked here... sorry.
*** harddisc 1 partition info ***
Ranish Partition Manager Version 2.43 (beta) by Muthu
Apr 09, 2002
File Starting Partition
# Type Row System Type Cyl Head Sect Size [KB]
0 MBR Master Boot Record 0 0 1 0
1 Pri Unused 0 0 2 31
2 >Pri 1 DOS FAT-16 0 1 1 497,983
3 Pri Windows FAT-32 62 0 1 1,992,060
4 Pri Windows FAT-32 LBA 310 0 1 14,996,677
5 Pri Windows NT NTFS 2,177 0 1 19,992,892
6 Pri Linux 4,666 0 1 19,996,892
7 Pri Linux 7,755 0 1 9,998,446
8 Pri Linux 10,730 0 1 9,998,446
9 Pri Unused 12,731 0 2 20,227,557
10 Pri 2 Windows FAT-32 LBA 13,731 0 1 20,788,110
11 Pri 4 Boot Manager 15,870 0 1 8,032
12 Pri Unused 15,872 0 1 1,357
RPM can be downloaded from www.ranish.com. Be sure to get version "2.43 (beta) by Muthu". It's the most functional. The interface is simple and intuitive... yet a bit cryptic in some aspects.
Trust me, it's worth the trouble of figuring out. Good luck. If you have any questions or experience any frustration ~I sure as HELL did~ drop me a line (lostcause@northstate.net)... I'll be glade to assist.
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