[wellylug] Dual Booting & MBR

[Arnim Littek]

On Wednesday 01 August 2007 20:39, tim_oflaherty wrote:
> Once I have reinstalled MS OS, how would I go about
> rewriting the MBR,

I'm sure there's a way to do it with a MS-world utility like rawrite or 
something, but the analogy from the Unix world is dd.

Before you reinstall MS, save your MBR

dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/my.mbr bs=512 count=1

and then copy that file my.mbr somewhere sensible - a USB key or a floppy (?!) 
where you can reach it once MS has taken over.  If rawrite won't do it (can't 
vouch for it), then as a worst case fallback, installing Cygwin on your MS 
partition will let you use dd.  I'm sure there's an easier way (a bootable CD 
such as Knoppix will also work).

Back in the bad old days of dual-booting, I saved my bacon more than once with 
an archived MBR... albeit never by using Windows to do it.

Arnim.