How to boot from a backup on hard drive?

BACKUP

Is it possible to boot from the BACKUP that you made on your hard drive after you have recovered it

And how would you do it if it is possible

Its very important and i would appreciate it very much if someone could help

BACKUP

The answer is "it depends".

If you backed up by making a disk image eg with symantec Ghost, then it should be bootable when restored.

If you just back up the files in the partition(s) then it may boot if the partition with windows on it is the same size and same place on the disk, the boot sector on the partition and the MBR on the drive are the same.

With windows 95/98/ME it was possible to restore the windows files to a primary partiton then get it to boot with some combination of;
a)booting from a win98 boot floppy and using the command sys a: c: to make the c: partition bootable
b)fdisk /MBR (the /mbr switch is undocumented because it caused trouble with some unusuall setups such as hardcards and MBR resident fixs for BIOS limitations)
c)using fdisk to set drive C: as the active partition.

In the win95/98/Me days this was complicated by the bugs and drive size limits in the version of FDISK supplied with win98, bios translation setting and the retarded behaviour of windows, it uses the drive geometary values from the MBR instead of what the drive hardware says which causes lots of problems.

I have no idea how to make an NTFS drive bootable again. Anyone?

Re: BACKUP

thanks for explanation but i do not have a floppy drive on my laptop but can boot through dr-dos cd to enter fdisk but cannot do anything with partitions