[Clonezilla-live] Backing up multiple MBR sectors

[Marcio T. <mar...@nu...>]

 

Hi,

 

I have been using Clonezilla to make disk images of several older
IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad computers (A22p, T42p and T43p) and I've found out
that these machines need a special MBR which occupies several sectors
for their Rescue and Recovery functionality. I was wondering if there
was any way to tell Clonezilla how many sectors of the MBR to save, as
this would help get a valid, bootable image.

 

The following is a discussion of workarounds I found mostly for the
benefit of other folks who may have ThinkPads and are trying to clone it
using Clonezilla.

 

Initially I found that my cloned T42p and T43p laptops would not boot
after cloning. The workaround was to boot an XP install disc, run the
recovery console, and run FIXMBR from there. This would install a
default XP MBR, and allow XP to boot, but would disable IBM Rescue and
Recovery functionality. It took me several other days to find a
solution, at least for the T42p and T43p laptops, involves running the
IBM provided BMGR32.exe for fixing the MBR.

 

The A22p laptops did not have this tool at all, so I ended up having to
use a tool called MBRWiz to copy the first four sectors of the harddisk
from a working laptop to a non-working one to restore the Rescue and
Recovery functionality.

 

-- Marcio