In some specific situations, you may want to backup only one partition but still wish to boot it as a disk image.
Lets see below how to turn a partition image into a disk image.
Before we start, have a a look at the below disk layout to have a better understanding of items such as MBR, BS, Disk and Partition.
1.Create a 1 MBytes (2048*512=1MB) header file (under virtualdisk, create raw disk image)
Note : instead of 2048 sectors, you can go for 63 or 128 or whatever « sectors before » may suit you – just report that number in the following steps.
2.Append this header to your partition image using the dos command line copy /b header.img+part.img disk.img
3.Adapt MBR type=07 (for ntfs), boot=80, chs start & end=1023*254*63, sectors before=2048, sectors=bootsector.totalsec+1
(You need to untick « hide advanced menu » under tools menu to enable advanced screens in CloneDisk).
4.Inject boot code (nt6) (this will also fix the mbr magic byte AA55).
5.Adapt bootSector hiddensec=2048 so that it matches MBR sectors before field
You are now ready to boot this image as it has all it requires to boot :
-a disk boot record
-a partition table
-a boot sector
-a consistent BPB (bios parameter block)