[PLUG] Backing up recovery partitions to a USB device, making bootable

[Greg Helledy <gregsonh@gra-inc.com>]

I think this is the problem, the USB stick isn't set up for an EFI boot.

Time goes on and things get more complicated and work less well.  I'm 
not only forced to buy Windows if I want a laptop, but have no 
convenient way to back it up such that I can actually use it if I need 
it.  And I believe that I'll need a working Windows install if I have a 
hardware failure within a year and I want to try to get warranty support.

Thinking about it last night, I decided to substitute money for pouring 
more effort into this and bought myself a replacement SSD.  I will 
remove the one that's in there, put the new one in, and install my OS 
onto a clean drive.  If any hardware fails within the next year, I'll 
swap them back before calling Dell.  When the warranty's up in a year, I 
can sell the SSD, or experiment with it as a way to speed up a desktop 
(move the OS to the SSD).

Thanks for the ideas, everyone, I just can't waste more time on trying 
to make a backup image (of the OS I paid for).



On 5/26/2016 10:52 AM, plug-request@lists.phillylinux.org wrote:
> So I've been lurking as I'm busy, but I wanted to mention that most recent
> recovery partitions are EFI based. If you want that USB backup to be
> bootable, you should clone the entire hard disk, at the very least you need
> an image of the UEFI ESP, the unformatted following partition (type MSR,
> size=128MB), and the two recovery partitions. One is MS's standard WinRE
> environment (~450MB), the other mostly just holds the stock image file.
> Depending on how Dell implemented their recovery environment, it may not
> function correctly without copying those partitions back to the target disk
> first, and creating the main NTFS partition on the host. A lot of recovery
> environments look for the NTFS partition that's supposed to hold Windows,
> and if they don't find it, will throw an error. Stupid and bad design, but
> it is what it is.
>
> I personally make a non-booting backup of the recovery partitions, and pair
> it with a USB with gparted live, clonezilla, or both.
>
> I also have an external hard disk set up specifically for Clonezilla work,
> it has CZ on a tiny partition at the front and then a massive FAT32
> partition for holding the backup files. Clonezilla segments backups by
> default, so the 4GB limit is no problem.
>
> TL;DR: This is likely more complicated than you think, but should be
> manageable with planning.

--
Greg Helledy
GRA, Incorporated
P:  +1 215-884-7500
F:  +1 215-884-1385
www.gra.aero
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