how to see master boot record
 

i don't know much about it is it possible to see the master boot record in linux console
i need the command to view the mbr in console ...
how we can see the master boot record entry in console of linux?

The MBR is defined as the first sector of the drive. (Sector = 512 bytes)

It can be viewed using dd---e.g.:

You can see a hexdump of the MBR by using the following command, as the root user:

(replace /dev/sda with /dev/hda if your system only has this)

You should get an output like:

Notice that the last two bytes are '55' and 'aa' respectively - this will be present as the last two bytes of the MBR for all little-endian systems, like x86, while it will be reversed ('aa' then '55') for big-endian systems. If you don't see this, you aren't looking at the master boot record.

John G

Almost all disk manipulating commands are capable of reading the mbr.

In the console, here is what you need do if you wanted to:

a) First we obtain a copy of the MBR; remembering that this table is the first 512 bytes of the disk, this we do: (be sure you are root):

root@host--# dd if=/dev/sda of=/root/mymbr bs=512 count=1 <Enter>

b) To read what is there you only read the 'mymbr' file in the root directory do this while as root:

root@host--# file /root/mymbr <Enter> (Do not use 'cat', just 'file')

See. You can read how partitions are accorded with their starthead sectors throughout the hardisk. This is the table that boot loader reads from in locating the partitions.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.