How do I backup my partition table?

Question

I just bought a new laptop with Windows 8 preloaded but without an actual Windows disk. I would obliterate the whole thing, but I need to use Visual Studio for one of my classes and the most recent version doesn't play well with wine (appdb).

I don't need to clone my whole harddrive, in fact I've already dd'd the recovery partition (which is all I really need). I just want to make a backup of my actual partition table so I can restore the recovery partition to the same place Windows originally put it.

EDIT: Additionally, does anyone know where Windows 8 actually stores it's bootloader so I can make a backup of that as well?

Answer 1

Assuming you use a GPT partition table, then you can use the tool sgdisk to backup your GPT header and partition table:

sgdisk --backup=<file> <device>

To restore the backup use:

sgdisk --load-backup=<file> <device>

To simply list the partition table use:

gdisk -l <device>

Answer 2

you can back up your partition table, if it is a msdos label disk with sfdisk

sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sda.partition

replace /dev/sda with your actual disk name when you boot into a livecd.

if it is a gpt table, you can use

parted /dev/sda print > sda.gpt.partion

there are other ways.

depending on whether you are using mbr or uefi, the boot sector/partition is different. for mbr, it is just the first sector of the disk of 512 bytes that you can save with dd.