restoring DOS partition from a tar file (SOLUTION)

[Kent Hauser]

On Tuesday 21 October 2003 04:17 pm, you wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Kent Hauser wrote:
> > Is it possible to backup a DOS partition (bootable) & restore it from a
> > tar file? I recently had a disk failure & used dump/restore on FreeBSD
> > partitions & made a tar dump of the DOS one. After "newfs_msdos" & "tar
> > x", the partition is not bootable. Is there a way to do this?
>
> This is actually a really interesting issue.  The short answer to this
> question is, "no."  The long answer is, "I don't really know.  Maybe."
>

I now know how to make this work. And it was a long strange journey.

First, when I did "fdisk" & "newfs_msdos" from FreeBSD, neither my W98 SE 
distribution CD, nor my "Gateway Restore" CD would recognize the drive! 
(Hardware error, no drive C found.) Then when I delete all partitions, the 
W98 distribution disk would format the drive & install the OS, but FreeBSD 
would freeze during the un-tar. (Same result, 2 tries.)

I was completely successful when I used the boot CD that came with the Seagate 
drive (downloadable from 
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html). The "fdisk" and 
"format" on that CD allowed me to partition and format for W98. I created a 
bootable floppy which allowed my to "sys" the new C drive. The W98 was 
bootable. And the "tar" restore from FreeBSD worked fine.

My conclusion: The FreeBSD fdisk + newfs_msdos seem to be buggy with regard to 
creating a primary DOS partition. The seagate tool + bootable W98 floppy 
allowed me to create bootable W98 partition. The tarfile restored the data.

Your mileage may vary as I'm not a very good judge of when W98 is working 
properly.