On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Kenneth Stephen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When I purchased my PC, it came with Win95 preloaded. After
> installing linux on it, lilo did back up the original bootsector and
> stored it in /boot, but over the past two years, and after a couple of
> Linux reinstalls, I lost the original bootsector (blush). Now, I am
> planning to reorganize my Win95 partition again, and I need to recover
the
> original bootsector.
Why, in the name of 13 basketsful of devils, do you need the original
bootsector? I can mail you one, made by dos 6.22 or dos 3.0, I'm not
sure which, but I'm sure there's no difference.
>
> The CompUSA support people that I talked to said that there is
no
> way I could recover just the bootsector - they could recover to the
> original configuration shipped. But this is useless to me.
>
What do you expect from CompUSA? Of course it is.
> They did say that 'fdisk /MBR' would recreate the original
> bootsector. So here is what I propose to do :
>
> 1. Take backups of th existing bootsector. Create Linux bootdisk.
> 2. Run 'fdisk /MBR' from within Win95. This should wipe out my
existing
> partition table in the MBR (first 512 bytes).
> 3. Reboot using my Linux boot disk. Now create a copy of the old
(backed
> up) bootsector (file A).
> 4. do 'dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot/B bs=446 count=1'
> 5. do 'dd if=/boot/B of=/boot/A bs=446 count=1'
>
> This should give me the original bootsector with the current
> partition tables. Am I right? Or am I shooting myself in the foot?
Better
> ideas are welcome.
At least with the fdisk from dos 6.22 run with dosemu, fdisk /mbr does
not molest the partition table. It just replaces the mbr boot program
in the first 446 bytes and the magic number in the last 2, so you
shouldn't need steps 4 and 5.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Kenneth
>
> There is no such thing as luck. 'Luck' is nothing but an absence of bad
luck.
>
Lawson
>< Microsoft free environment
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