How to backup & restore the MBR in linux?

sgzlit · 03-01-2005, 09:32 PM

I am searching a way to backup and restore the MBR of the disk in linux.
who has some good ideas to do it?
you are appreciatedto share your experience!

thx a lot

Matir · 03-01-2005, 09:35 PM

For a pure backup:

Code:

dd if=/dev/hda of=BACKUPMBR bs=512 count=1

Obviously, replace /dev/hda with the appropriate device for your system.

BajaNick · 03-01-2005, 09:39 PM

Matir, Could you break down that line and tell us what each of those commands do? Thanks.

Matir · 03-01-2005, 09:57 PM

Hehe, sure.
[code]dd if=/dev/hda of=BACKUPMBR bs=512 count=1[/count]

dd: program to perform bit-by-bit copying.
if: input file (or device) to read from
of: output file (or device) to write to
bs: block size, in bytes
count: number of blocks to read/write

This will copy the first 512 bytes of the /dev/hda (which is the Master Boot Record) to the file "BACKUPMBR".

Hope this helps.

BajaNick · 03-01-2005, 11:09 PM

Cool, Thanks.

amosf · 03-01-2005, 11:25 PM

If you do a man dd you get lots of this cool info...

Matir · 03-02-2005, 09:33 AM

You can do almost anything with dd! It even makes pancakes (ok, not really).

dd if=/dev/hda of=BACKUPMBR bs=512 count=1 means to copy 1 block of 512 bytes from /dev/hda to BACKUPMBR.

Hope that helps.

The formatting was fun anyway.

BajaNick · 03-02-2005, 09:07 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by amosf
If you do a man dd you get lots of this cool info...

I did that right after the last post.