Use dd for partition to partition - not disk to disk

[matulike]

I am and have for ages been happily dual booting XP and Mac OSX (10.4.8) from the same hard disk using Acronis OS Selector.

 

I have been trying out Leopard but having different problems. I'm gonna try a couple of the fixes I've just found (renaming the partion to Leopard etc). But my question is this:

 

There is a batch file which copies the Leopard image to a disk. So you dont need an install DVD and all that, you just use dd from Windows and it does it. I'm just wondering if anyone can advise me on using it to write from my XP partition (not DISK) to my OSX partition (on the same disk as XP!).

 

The command for writing to 'disk0' is:

 

dd if=leopard-x86-flat-img of=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 bs=5M --progress

pause

 

So presumably, first if I change the executable dd.exe to dd-partition.exe then from what I can tell it'll only write partitions then anyway, so that kind of safe guards me from overwriting a whole disk (cos I could kinda do without that!).

 

But I'm cinsideringthe MBR and how this is going to affect that. And the boot loader. (Acronis).

 

The thing is, OSX has ALWAYS been the first partition on the disk. So XP is the second. So every time I re-install OSX (and it's been done several times!) I'm wrinting over the first part of the disk. I dont know if it's the first 512bytes that I need to skip using dd.exe - I'm sure there is some parameter that needs to be added for this to work. I just need to overwrite the partition that is already there.

 

Can anyone advise at all?

 

Thanks.