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3molo
Asked: 2011-01-16 23:40:08 +0800 CST

dd cloned win2003 std ntfs partition, "no operating system found"

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I cloned an existing ntfs partition on faulty hardware using dd and gzip. The copied partition was then written to a newly created ntfs partition on a new disk (on another server) and the bootable flag was set.
However, the "Operating system not found" (or is it No operating system found?) is what happens when I try to boot it.

The faulty server is part of the AD domain, but I do not have the local administrator password, so I couldn't use the repair console of windows 2003 to fixmbr. I did try to do a normal repair during win2003 installation menu, but with no success. Both windows installation and Linux recognizes it as a ntfs partition of its true size, and files can be seen and read.

I've done this a couple of times before, but I didn't encounter this problem. Of course I encountered other problems, like BSDO due to lack of hw drivers etc - but that was pretty easily fixed.

Why am I failing to get the copied partition to even be recognized as a bootable disk on the new server?

windows-server-2003 clone dd

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Have you tried to backup from faulty machine also the MBR of the disk ?

    for backup the MBR with dd run this on faulty machine : 

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/aleroot/boot.mbr bs=512 count=1

    and then for restore the MBR in the new machine : 

    dd if=boot.mbr of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

    You could run this dd commandline booting up the machine with a GNU/Linux Live CD image like Knoppix.

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