Have a simple question for anyone to answer: I have a dual boot system with Windows 7 (64-bit) and Linux MINT 18.1 (64-bit) on one drive. I do have a second drive, but lets skip that for now. The boot drive uses GRUB2 which gives me the option of which OS to boot into and everything works fine.
If I use (have not purchased yet) Paragon's Hard Disk Manager v15 Professional to perform an image of this hard drive (a SAS Seagate 15K 600Gb Cheetah hard drive), will I be able to perform a simple re-image of both the ext4 and NTFS partitions on my boot drive if I need this? Will the re-imaging recovery also insure that the GRUB2 bootloader is reinstalled correctly or do I need to use the Linux Terminal obtained by booting from a Live Linux MINT CD) and enter the following two commands:
sudo grub-install /dev/sda
sudo update-grub
This is very important considering many people have dual boot systems these days and the number is increasing dramatically. Linux and Windows are becoming neighbors more frequently now and a backup/imaging software tool needs to be cognizant of this reality.
Let me know if anybody knows this answer and/or has gone through a re-image/recovery using Paragon's HD Manager v15 Professional.
I'm on a dual boot W7/W10 but on their own drives so I make an image of each with HDM15S.
On the other hand I have Linux Mintmate 18.1 64-bit on a Sandisk Extreme Pro USB 3.1 SSD . There are two partitions, one is FAT32 and the other is EXT4 so that's similar(Windows and non-Windows) to what you are asking. I have no problem creating an image and restoring something I needed to do in the last few days. BTW: I love those Sandisk SSD, have two now, running the MintMate from a legacy BIOS USB 2.0 port runs much faster the newest generation standard PNY USB 3.0 flash drives.
As long as your drive is booted via MBR/BIOS (thus non-UEFI) I guess it's like follows:
The booting starts in the MBR. The MBR resides before the first partition. Only partitions can be saved/copied. That's why the MBR is rewritten any time Paragon restores/copies a HDD. Linux is not supported. So Paragon writes a MBR that boots into Windows. GRUB2 is out of the game.
You can presumably reinstall the MBR part of GRUB2 using any Linux commands I don't know. You may want to save the MBR separately using dd. This requires to know the size (sector count) of the MBR. In the sector editor of HDM you see where the first partition starts or where the MBR ends to judge the amount of sectors you have to save. With HDM Pro you can save and restore sector dumps unsing the sector editor instead of dd. Since the MBR does not change usually you don't have to do this more than once.
After a Restore there is an alert from HDM15S about Linux telling one to do "something", I forget what it says as I've always ignored it with no problem at all.
Reply With Quote