fdisk /MBR will not wipe out your "partition table". (lucky you)
fdisk /MBR will overwrite your MBR (Master Boot Record), that is the
first 512 bytes of your disk, with the win95 original MBR.
The only thing that you will loose is your LILO MBR.
in short:
after fdisk /MBR, your computer will boot straight into win95. to put
back LILO in your MBR you will ahev to boot linux from your rescue floppy
disk and run lilo.
(all lilo conf in /etc/lilo.conf is still here, no problemo).
pascal
-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Stephen [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Sunday, June 06, 1999 6:07 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Recovering the original bootsector
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.
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.
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.
Thanks in advance,
Kenneth
There is no such thing as luck. 'Luck' is nothing but an absence of bad
luck.
