Preserving Non-Mounted Partitions

[Brian E. Seppanen]

I have some older HP (Compaq) Servers that are going to be repurposed. 
On these systems the System Configuration, and BIOS options are available 
via a system partition that is created by the Hardware Installation CD's. 
The partition is give a Drive Type of 12 for Compaq Diagnostics.   I want 
to retain this data.    Is there some method of preserving that data.    I 
tried

disk_config disk1
primary /compaq  9              ro                      ; preserve1

The installation sequence ended up creating a ext3 partition, whereas the 
data was not an ext3 partition previously.

Has anyone else found a way to do this?

I'm using FAI 2.8.4 with debian 3.1.

Thanks,