Re: [PATCH] Backup old boot sectors before installation

[address@hidden]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Zhu Yi <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 06:04 +0800, Isaac Dupree wrote:
>> > Option 1~3 requires the recover has the knowledge of the backup file
>> > format somehow, but a simple dd is enough for option 4. What do you
>> > think?
>>
>> If the partitioning had been changed in the mean time, 4 would overwrite
>> it with the older values. Similar problem for a weird setup with
>> partitions in between (I dunno, might be possible with GPT or other
>> weirdness).
>
> Good point.
>
>> I think option 2 or 3 is soundest.  Option 2 would have three separate
>> files of information, (right?), and there must be a pretty
>> straightforwards `dd` option to skip to the correct start position.
>> Option 3 would omit the "start position" file... but that file is really
>> cheap, maybe we'd better keep things simple for restorers and stick with
>> three separate files.(Or, we could do something weird like putting
>> start-position somewhere in the filename of the backup.)
>
> This requires the restorer to understand the role of each of the 3 (or
> 2) files and use `dd' twice with correct options. So an important thing
> is, we need to document this somewhere. And I think the best place is to
> "document" it in the grub-install script. Because this will enable the
> not-so-advanced user to recover her boot sectors easily as well.
>
> If we decide so, we go back to option 1 (my original implementation).
> Because the backup file format is not important any more as it is
> totally transparent to the restorers. Am I right?

Another option would be to start the backup file with "#!/bin/sh" ...

>
> Thanks,
> -yi
>
>
>
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