I've been trying to use Ubuntu's "Disks" program to create images of partitions on my friend's laptop and then restore them without success. I take backups onto an external hard drive, then delete all partitions on the laptop, create empty partitions with the exact number of original bytes and restore the images from the external HDD, but Windows isn't even able to find its own bootloader and so I can't boot.
So now I'm trying something different. She doesn't use Windows anyway, so I'm going to leave the Windows partitions intact, and chose sda7 to install the the Ubuntu 16.04 bootloader.
Now in BIOS I can see a separate Windows bootloader and the Ubuntu grub64 file which I selected as the trusted UEFI file for bootloading. So now she has a dual-boot system.
Now I want to try creating a clone of sda7 (using Ubuntu's "disks" app), so that even if I delete partitions sda7, sda5 and sda6 and then re-create them and restore sda7's clone, I should be able to select the bootloader of sda7 from BIOS as the trusted bootloader and have a dual-boot system as before.
But before doing that, I want to verify if the bootloader is really in sda7. I tried doing grep -r "grub" .
from the root folder, but that's probably the wrong thing to look for, so could you help with this? How do I make sure the bootloader is in sda7? Which files are those?
dd
to backup an entire drive or the partitions containing the OS and EFI system partition, I'd still have to reinstall grub? Is there any documentation online that explains how to do these? I've been having a lot of trouble with getting Windows or Ubuntu to find the bootloader everytime I try.