restoring DOS partition from a tar file

[Lowell Gilbert]

Kent Hauser <kent.hauser at verizon.net> writes:

> 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?

Not from a tar file.  I've only needed to do this once, and I used
dd.  [Plus fdisk(8), I guess...]

The other obvious approach is to do a clean and basic DOS install and
then restore the tar file on top of it.  This won't work as well as
you get to more recent versions of Microsoft OS, but I think it should
still be possible.