backing up a whole hard disk

[dave at math.mit.edu (David Backeberg)]

On Thu, 12 May 2005, Gregory Boyce wrote:
> On Thu, 12 May 2005, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>>  For the most part, a file-by-file backup will work fine even for Windows. 
>>  I
>>  do that for Windows 9x, and the only additional action needed when
>>  restoring is to run the SYS utility. I'm not 100% sure what you would need
>>  to do with Windows 2K or XP.
>
> Unless your partition is NTFS due to the immaturity of the NTFS linux driver.

NTFS write support has no longer been marked "experimental" in 2.6 for a 
few revisions of the kernel. I assume that means that there aren't known 
problems with this support. Of course, I wouldn't bother with it for the 
backup and restore, and instead use the method recommended earlier.

Nobody has discussed this yet, but my personal process for installing a 
dual-boot Windows system on a fresh disk:
1) boot Knoppix and partition, with first partition being NTFS for 
windows. Flag this partition as active; I don't think it's always 
required, but I've heard of this being mandatory on some hardware with 
some versions of Windows.
2) install Windows. It will ignore the non-Windows partitions.
3) install linux, install boot loader in MBR (this will override Windows 
boot loader) and configure linux boot loader to use the appropriate method 
for booting Windows.