Hi, I want to be able to do some advanced backups and restores with dd tool (other products don't interest me unless I have a proof it is impossible to do it with dd). Therefore I am trying to find out if I can use dd to do 2 things : 1) backup and restore a partition to the same location (same partition specs present in MBR). After some googling I found out this works fine, but didn't test it yet. For example I start a Fedora 13 Live CD and use the dd tool to backup in 2 files the 2 Windows 7 partitions: System Reserved and Windows OS partition. To test it, I will delete filesystems on the 2 partitions and then restore them with dd, and check if it's OK. 2) backup a partition and restore it on another partition (different specs in MBR for the 2 partitions, the restore partition being at least the exact size as the backup partition), partitions being on different disks or on the same disk. I couldn't find in Google similar attempts, so here I am posting in this forum (to begin with). For point 2) I tried a test that resulted in "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart". For this test, I used partitions holding Windows stuff (boot files and OS files). 2 disks configuration (setup before test): - WD Caviar Blue 320GB ---- active NTFS primary partition : System Reserved ~120MB ---- NTFS primary partition : Windows OS ~20GB ---- NTFS primary partition : data partition ~290GB - Seagate Barracuda 500GB ---- active ext4 primary partition : grub boot partition ~1GB ---- LVM primary partition : Fedora 13 partition ~15GB ---- free space : ~100GB ---- ext2 primary partition : data partition ~350GB BIOS first boot disk is Barracuda, active partition is grub boot partition, in GRUB menu I can boot Fedora and bootstrap the Caviar MBR which starts Windows 7, System Reserved is the active partition on this disk. The test consists in copying the 2 Windows partitions from Caviar to Barracuda, setting BIOS to boot Barracuda first, and making the System Reserved partition that I just copied into Barracuda active. Also I used the Windows 7 install CD to fix the MBR on Barracuda to be Windows 7 compatible (bootsect /nt60 I: /mbr, I: being new System Reserved partition letter under Windows Recovery System). 2 disks configuration (setup for test): - WD Caviar Blue 320GB ---- active NTFS primary partition : System Reserved ~120MB ---- NTFS primary partition : Windows OS ~20GB ---- NTFS primary partition : data partition ~290GB - Seagate Barracuda 500GB ---- active ext4 primary partition : grub boot partition ~1GB ---- LVM primary partition : Fedora 13 partition ~15GB ---- active NTFS primary partition : System Reserved ~200MB ---- NTFS primary partition : Windows OS ~30GB ---- free space : ~450GB When booting I get the "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart". The Ctrl + Alt + Del combo doesn't work and I have to press the power button to shut down the PC. Does anyone have an idea why do I have this error ? NB: the 2 Windows partitions I copied from Caviar to Barracuda seem to work since I could list the files in both from Fedora 13 Live and could create 2 files to identify the new partitions in the Windows Recovery System. Another question related to this test is : Does the NTFS filesystem make use of absolute disk sector references which could explain the error message ? Does such a filesystem exist ? According to this document www . win . tue . nl/~aeb/linux/vfs/trail-3.html the block / sector conversion seems to be done at a level lower than the filesystem type dependent code in the Linux kernel, also hard coded sector references in filesystems don't make sense. What about Windows kernel ? Thanks