Backup/Restore your mac (only tested PPC) from a linux box using gparted, a firewire cable, a calculator, mount and dd.
/! PLEASE NOTE that I only write this so that people can try to make a full clone of their mac’s hard-drive including the partition table. If you have any mis-hap while playing with the following instructions I am in no way responsible for it. It worked for me, but may not work for you. At least you are warned.
Checking you have everything:
- a PPC Mac (using the HFS+ hard-drives that don’t have a MSDOS disk label)
- a firewire cable (and a firewire card in your linux box)
- following linux tools:
- gparted
- mount
- dd
Backup your mac:
- First, if you mac is on, please turn it off.
- Start your mac while pressing the ‘T’ key on your keyboard. This will boot your computer into ‘Target mode’. (for more info)
- After you see a firewire logo appear on the screen of your mac, you can insert the firewire cable into your mac and your linux box.
- [OPTIONAL] Open Gparted (only if you want to be able to mount the disk image on your linux box later on)
- find the correct device id and display it (in my case /dev/sde)
- right click on the biggest partition (the partition normally containing your system and data, the two other ones are only holding the partition table and boot firmware) and display properties.
- copy the “First Sector” in the calculator and multiply this number by 512bits (see why here) (/!keep this number safely)
- close Gparted
- in a root terminal type the following after replacing the /dev/sde by the device representing your mac and the filename you want your file to have:
dd if=/dev/sde of=/PLACE_YOU_SAVE_YOUR_FILE/FILENAME.ddimage - be patient…. it will take a while~
Restore your mac:
- First, if you mac is on, please turn it off.
- Start your mac while pressing the ‘T’ key on your keyboard. This will boot your computer into ‘Target mode’. (for more info)
- After you see a firewire logo appear on the screen of your mac, you can insert the firewire cable into your mac and your linux box.
- If your system auto-mounted or you mounted some of the partitions of your mac, please unmount them now (ie: umount /dev/sde1)
- Now let’s copy the image back to your mac
- in a root terminal, after replacing /dev/sde by the device representing your mac and the filename to the real filename of your image, type the following:
dd if=/PLACE_YOU_SAVE_YOUR_FILE/FILENAME.ddimage of=/dev/sde - once again, be patient
MORE TO COME:
Compression
mounting the image file