hidden FAT16 partition restored as regular FAT16 partition

[Suede Worthey]

Well, I am writing an enterprise-class imaging/management solution, similar to FOG, Altiris, and Ghostcast, and I was using partimage to image my machines and udpcast for multicasting. I found partimage-ng, and decided to give it a try, as I was considering rewriting partimage to capture and restore whole disks, and I really hate the GUI. So, I started testing with some of my images. I restored an image with Altiris, and captured it with partimage-ng using my software for PXE, etc... The original image had a hidden FAT16 (OEM diagnostic) partition. Partimage-ng captured the image with no complaints, but upon restoring the image, it restored the hidden partition as a normal FAT16 partition. I was considering writing a fix, but when I started, I started looking at libparted to figure out how to get the partition type from the partition table (whether it's msdos, GPT, etc...), and store the original information in the image, so upon restoring the image, I could set the partition back as a hidden one. I couldn't find anything in libparted to easily change the id for the partition. I had written the code to do it for MSDOS partition tables, but I am not that familiar with anything except MSDOS and GPT partition tables. I would appreciate if someone could help me develop a fix for this. I will get a dump of the partition tables next week when I go back to work, so you all can see the differences.

Thanks,
Suede Worthey