MBR Back Up/Restore

[(Shovel)]

Hello again,

I'll probably be reinstalling *nix of some flavour or other soon, but last time it overwrote my MBR (though I'm sure I told it not to...). Is there a nice way to make a backup of the MBR (current WinXP boot.ini setup) so that, if something does get overwritten, I can just pop it back again and boot XP as if nothing had happened?

 

[Testin da Cable]

if you're going to dualboot it's best to install the unix (in this case) last, and let it do your MBR for you. most nixen tend to be made to dualboot nicely with just about everything, while (iirc) a windows won't play with anything but another windows.

as to backing the damn thing up, once again I only know how to do this on unix. sorry

 

[(Shovel)]

Some hunting about has revealed "Boot.exe" as a utility to do it, so that'll do me fine

Out of curioisity TDC, how is it done from nix?

 

[Testin da Cable]

dd if=device of=backup-file count=1 bs=512

where device is the drive you boot from and backup-file is whereever you want the output to go. bs is whatever your blocksize is.

 

[(Shovel)]

ooh. Thank you

 

[Mellow-]

Backing up your System State Data is fantasticly useful.