The OP could BU his mbr first...

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Dec 20, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook did say:

> I once read someone explain how to use dd to backup the mbr to a file,
> with which you could then use dd to restore the mbr to it's exact
> original contents in the even some new boot loader didn't work the way it
> should have... Then I found out about a "better" method using sfdisk
> 
-snipped. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        .         .stuff
> Though I suspect that if the size or type of any of the partitions
> were modified it might be better to just restore the MBR using the
> dd method... The way I see it, it can't hurt to make both backups
> And then think about it when/if it's time to restore one of them.

I got curious. and decided to check out the text file the sfdisk method
would create. And now I don't believe the sfdisk method can restore the
mbr itself... So I'm thinking it's a good idea to use both methods.
the dd method is supposed to back-up and restore the mbr. (I found several
similar examples of it that said so when I scroogled it...) but it doesn't
preserve the rest of the partition table... Meanwhile the sfdisk method may
be useful to repair a corrupted partition table. Don't know how well it
works, (I sure don't hope I'll ever have reason to test it) But it occurs
to me that if I bother with the sfdisk data, I should maybe keep it on a
different drive, or put it on a flash drive or some such because if the
partition table needs to be restored to access the disk, it might be hard
to read the file from the affected disk...

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