Cloning a bootable FAT32 drive \ VOGONS

Cloning a bootable FAT32 drive

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First post, by xjas

Posted on 2017-03-28, 20:01

xjas Offline

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Right, so trying to upgrade the 1.3GB drive in my Micron laptop. I cloned it onto my Linux machine using dd:

1sudo dd if=/dev/sdf of=bootdrive.img

(Note that I imaged sdf, not sdf1 - i.e. the whole drive, boot sector, partition table, etc.)

Then I copied that onto a lager drive by dd-ing it back. It mounts fine in Linux and seems to work as it should. The rest of the drive is reported as empty space, and I could add more partitions or resize the one that's there if I wanted to. (I didn't yet.)

Put the new drive into the laptop and I cannot get the thing to boot no matter what I do. It shows up in the BIOS, I've got the boot order set correctly, etc. I can even boot DOS (FreeDOS or MS-DOS 7) from a CD and use it normally as a non-boot drive. DOS fdisk shows the partition is set to PRI DOS and it's FAT32, as it should be. But all I get is "invalid system disk" on startup.

I've tried this on a 4GB IDE SSD and a 5GB spinny disk - same result.

What am I missing??

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Reply 1 of 3, by jesolo

Posted on 2017-03-28, 20:40

jesolo Offline

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You didn't specify which OS you had installed on the old drive, but I'm assuming it's Windows 95b or Windows 98.

Does FDISK indicate a drive letter for the partition on the new drive?
Try booting up with bootable disk for the same OS that is installed on the partition (hard drive) and just type FDISK /MBR at the command prompt.
If that doesn't work, try typing at the command prompt "SYS C:" (without the quotation marks). This will transfer the system files back to the drive and should now be bootable.

I cannot quite recall whether the second step will actually boot up straight into Windows, but you will then just have to edit the MSDOS.SYS file - refer this link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-za/help/1185 … -msdos.sys-file

Reply 2 of 3, by Jorpho

Posted on 2017-03-28, 21:22

Jorpho Offline

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Is the "Active" flag on the partition set? That often causes problems.

Reply 3 of 3, by xjas

Posted on 2017-03-28, 21:45

xjas Offline

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Oops, it's Win98. Turns out booting from a CD and running "sys c:" worked. I don't really understand why, since it was an exact dupe of the old disk (IIRC 98 has no real uuid scheme or anything like that?) but I'm not complaining. Another problem I was having was the SSD was slightly widening the metal drive caddy and making it pop out of its mounting tabs when I closed the machine up, breaking contact with the IDE connector. A bit of bending sorted that out but it took me a bit to spot that it was going on.

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