Clone/restore first sectors of a disk or partition?

[CDuv]

Hello,

I'm looking for a way to clone and restore the beginning of an hard disk drive.

I'll quickly explain to you the context of why I'm trying to do such thing.

I used rawwrite on Windows to create some bootable floppy and it seems either I did a mistake either it has some bug: but in the end my computer hanged later in the night and refused to boot the OS since then.
I removed the SATA drive from my computer and plugged in on another computer only to notice that there is now only one 1.4MB FAT partition on my entire disk instead of some 300MB "SYSTEM" invisible partition and my two NTFS Windows and data partitions.

The fact that now my 320GB disk appears as a 1.4MB disk just after I used some image writer program to create a 1.4MB floppy can't be coincidental.

Using EaseUS Partition Recovery on my "broken" disk I can tell my datas partitions are still there, intact, just after the damaged MBR and 300MB SYSTEM ones.

My computer is a HP laptop and I do have another laptop of the exact same model: thus I thought I could clone the MBR+SYSTEM partitions from this one and put them on my disk over the damaged partitions.
I can't find the right tool for that...

Here is a snapshot of Partition Saving listing partitions of the good/working disk:
http : / / img823 . imageshack . us/img823/9691/parionsavinglistofnorma.jpg

[mroz]

I have no idea if cloning the first 1.4MB of your system disk between identical (in respect of hardware) systems will work, however if you wish to try it, look up the unix tool dd. Oddlyish the company that made rawwrite for windows also have a version of dd for windows, not that I've used it myself.

Personally I'd boot with a linux live cd & try to use dd, as long as one is confident enough that one won't accidentally cause greater damage

[peterb]

Pretty much as mroz says. This will only work if the second disk is partioned exactly the samer as the first.

Alternatively you could use a partition recovery tool, (runtime software do some tools for example www.runtime.org) or just google.

If you do use the second disk in that way, back it up first.

[CDuv]

Oups, forgot that thread I had opened. Let's update it:

I managed to repair my disk partition table by using TestDisk (from cgsecurity.org), then I used Partition Saving to clone the MBR, the "First sectors, the Partition table and the NTFS "SYSTEM" 300MB partition from my other HP laptop.

By using PLoP Boot Manager from Ultimate Boot CD I can now boot Windows Seven (without it it doesn't).