Restoring XP Operating System Question

I have 5 partitions on my hard drive. Using the Boot disk, and the Full Feature Linux option, I created a backup of Drive C only.

Can I restore Drive C and the Master Boot Record, MBR, that contains the Partition sizes and Format types from this backup?

Must I backup the entire Hard Drive to be able to restore Drive C and the MBR information so that all of the partitions will be configured?

I made separate backups of each of the remaining partitions and plan to restore each of them separately if necessary.

If my operating system is damaged I only want to restore the operating system. I do not want to restore the undamaged partitions.

 

Once a system disk has an MBR and a Active partition the only time that you need to restore the MBR is if the disk won't boot and it reports that the MBR is corrupt or if you change the Active partition. Both of these possible events are rare and unlikely.

You can restore the system partition without impacting on the other partitions. For example, I have a disk which I use for testing hardware and software. It has 4 partitions, 3 of which are assigned to operating systems and 1 to data. In the course of testing I frequently corrupt one of the OS's, particularly when I am testing Beta software.

This is not a problem. I simply restore the OS from the last known good image and in less time than it takes to have a cup of coffee I am up-and-running again.

Obviously, when working with system partitions, MBR's and boot sequences, certain precautions must be exercised and a good background knowledge in how a system boots and what to do if it won't is very useful.

But, as long as you are careful and work in a methodical and organised way you should not have any problems.

 

Starting with Version 9, TI backed up the MBR when making images of partitions; prior to that one had to image a whole disk to get the MBR included.

You can restore C and the MBR to a bare drive but you must have the same number of partitions setup on the new drive for it to boot properly. The size of the partitions is not important but the number of them is.

As Tabvla pointed out if you are restoring your C partition back onto a working bootable drive you don't even have to restore the MBR since it is already there and functional.

 

When replacing one partion for another do they need to be the same size?

 

No, you can resize on the fly, as long as the new partition is big enough to hold the data in the image. The TI gui shows the size of the files in the image within the size of the original structure.
(I keep empty images, in different file systems, just for that purpose.)

As seekforever pointed out, the system drv, if installed to a different partition number won't boot, but all you have to do is get to the \boot.ini and edit it for the system to point to the correct Drv\Partition.

I usually place my C: System partition, as the 2nd partition

It sounds like the backup procedure you are developing is a good one.