whats a good program to backup my master boot record
 

Hi, i need to reinstall my windows xp on its partition without having to reinstall my linux, and this is on a dual boot system.

I think the master boot record is what i want to backup...then restore after installing the windows...so whats a good and easy program to do this? does the xp cd have one?

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux-General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

With Slackware, the installation ISO doubles as a recover disk. So, I can use my CD to boot into my linux installation on my slave drive. I assume Fedora must be similar.

After installing XP (make sure it doesn't touch your Linux partitions), just boot from the recover/installation CD, then run Lilo.

Before doing that though, test out booting from the CD into your current Linux installation to make sure it works.

I use Active@ Partition Recovery. You can make a backup of the MBR of each of your hard disks to a floppy disk

Windows XP cd has a utility to restore the MBR but I don't think it has one to back it up afaik. Boot from the cd, enter recovery console and type fixmbr. That command restores the master boot code without destroying the partition table already in place.

If you boot Linux with grub then it may help to make a boot disk just in case;

1. boot from the linux cd enter rescue mode by typing linux rescue at the boot prompt

once you get a command prompt, type

chroot /mnt/sysimage

and then

grub-install /dev/fd0

after that you can leave windows boot record on the mbr and always boot linux from the floppy disk.

Hope this helped :)

Of course, dd is the easiest option for backing up your MBR.
Let's assume you want to back up to a floppy. You can also do it to a file, just replace /dev/fd0 with the filename. This also assumes /dev/hda is the hard drive containing the mbr in question.
To restore:

Looking at your instructions sorta gives me an idea.

Situation: windows just installed and totally bashed mbr so it loads by default.

So if i used the linux rescue cd, i could just install grub using those commands and specifying my hd instead and reinstall grub good as new? maybe i should backup my grun.conf file instead :P

I suppose that could work but then how would you go about loading Windows? Is there a way to load Windows from grub? I have never tried it myself.

Yes...you can add windows to the list, and probably other os's, along with your list of installed kernals

In theory, virtually any OS should be loadable from GRUB, due to the nature of bootloaders.

Cool.

In that case you might find this helpful. I did :)

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/sho...+/mnt/sysimage

Wow thats one hell of a post on installing grub :)

Yeah I found it quite helpful. The only thing it was missing was the instructions on how to lock the OS from loading. Set a grub password and type lock underneath each OS in the grub.conf file. Like so;

password --md5 <md5 hash>

Then the only way to load the OS is by first pressing "p" and then providing the password :) Good way to protect against that insecure mess of a Windows operating system :-\

lol