Speaking of tar, Can I use it to BU my win98 partition.

[Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha]

On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 11:30:28PM -0400, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
> Thank you James. OK if there are issues with mkdosfs -F32, then I will
> probably need that win98 rescue floppy to preserve the ability to
> defrag... But I don't see why I'd want to sys c:? What does it put there
> that tar couldn't restore and wasn't going to be overwritten by the 
> lilo -b /dev/hda? 

Information in DOS boot sector. And in older DOS, the boot files had to be
in specific locations.

There are other issues with using tar:
1) dosfs uses a different set of attributes: hidden, archive, system and
read-only, and only the read-only bit is exported/used under linux
2) dosfs has two entries for long filenames: the shorter version and the
longer version split in several parts. I wouldn't expect problems when
software use the long names, but when extracting the files under linux
there's no guarantee that the short name will be the same as before. If
any software (under windows) uses the short name directly, then you're
likely to have problems.

For the past years I never tried the tar solution. I always "dd"ed the raw
partition (creating beforehand a zeroed file to erase garbage for better
compression).

I think I had some failed attempts with windows95, that made
me never to try again. But it could be that win98 is more resistant to 1)
and 2), and make you a happy person. :)

Regards,
Luciano Rocha