From your backup command, note the blocksize (512 bytes, 1 sector), and count (1, so 1 block). Just increase the count to the number of sectors you want.
Usually, the first 63 sectors are not partitioned. This has to do with the old cylinder/head/sector adressing of drives, fdisks only wanting to allocate complete tracks (i.e. a full circle on 1 side of 1 platter) and the very first sector of the first track being occupied by the MBR. Modern disks emulate tracks to have 63 sectors for backward compatibility. So in short, you're usually safe by dd-ing up to 63 sectors.
I'm not familiar enough with Partition Image, but I do know some cloning utilities can resize the cloned fs to fill the whole target disk, or write to other partitions (e.g. to add a cloned OS next to an existing one). This can make the actual data shift positions. Before loading the filesystem drivers, GRUB only knows about bare sectors, so some shifting of data can confuse it.
|
