I have read man dd, but still am unsure of what it means. look at this line of code
with having the count=1 option, will it only do the mbr? I have used that command before and it seemed to format the WHOLE drive.

That clears the MBR. The partition table is located in that space also, so it will appear to format the drive.
However, that's only an illusion as you can restore a saved MBR and the partitions and data will re-appear if you haven't actually formated anything.

I use dd or sfdisk to save and restore the mbr.
For example:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/images/mbrfile bs=512 count=1
dd if=/mnt/images/mbrfile of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

or

sfdisk -d /dev/hda > mbrfile
sfdisk /dev/hda < mbrfile

( man sfdisk )
-d Dump the partitions of a device in a format useful as input to
sfdisk. For example,
% sfdisk -d /dev/hda > hda.out
% sfdisk /dev/hda < hda.out
will correct the bad last extended partition that the OS/2 fdisk cre-
ates.

Thanks, that clears it up :-)