On 2011-05-17 14:55, gencap@email.it wrote:
It would be useful to have in device selection menu,
in addition to whole hard drive and partitions (hda, hda1..hdn),
a "MBR-only" item (e.g. to access just the first 512 bytes of the device).
In order to clone just the 512 bytes of the device, pipe it through dd on the sender.
In order to do this, enter the following line into the "Additional parameters" dialog near the end:
-p "dd bs=512 count=1"
The busybox on the CD image supports dd
[...]
Of course, I'm referring to cast-o-matic generated images: with a
full-blown environment it's easy to "dd" and cast the MBR.
You can also enter these "Additional parameters" into cast-o-matic.
Another task that is pretty common in a classroom or lab environment,
is cloning the CMOS memory: I'm using a DOS based utility but
with a bunch of lines of code it should be possible to patch busybox
to handle CMOS memory operations.
Theoretically, you could achieve this by having a program that reads it and prints it to stdout, using that program as a "pipe" (just like dd above), and use /dev/null as a device.
Unfortunately, I don't have any experience about reading (or writing) CMOS memory, but maybe you can find something on freshmeat or sourceforge.
Regards,
Alain