loadYOURSELF

You can backup your system partition table with sfdisk which you can also inlude extended partitions.

backup partition table

sfdisk -d /dev/sda > my-sda.sf


restore partition table

sfdisk /dev/sda < my-sda.sf --force


you can download the sfdisk source from

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/v2.15/


and you can compile it for your desktop PC or for your embedded device. (cross compiling)

MBR is the master boot record of your disks. It includes also partition table. If you want to create one to one partition table and don’t want to copy all your disk you can use the commands below

to backup your mbr

dd if=/dev/sdX of=mbr.bin bs=512 count=1

to restore back your mbr

dd if=mbr.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446

BACKUP DISK

dd if=/dev/sdX | gzip > a.gz

RESTORE BACK

gzip -dc  a.gz | dd of=/dev/sdX