backing up and restoring boot sector

[rpowersau at gmail.com]

On 4/20/05, ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY <zamb at spymac.com> wrote:
<snip>
> Microsoft historically never used the MBR.  All their OSes clear the MBR
> and set a boot-able partition (usually the first one, or "C:") and put
> the boot code in there (msdos.sys (or io.sys, I forgot which one, I'm
> too old) for DOS and Windows 9x/Me, and ntloader.something for Windows
> NT/2000/XP/2003).

The mbr is the first 512 bytes of the drive marked as bootable. The
bios runs the code in the mbr. This code loads the actual windows
bootloader and runs it. The MS operating system loader is not in the
mbr but ms must install it's code that loads the loader in the mbr.
Grub replaces that code and is able to load the ms operating system
loader or linux. Grub is much smarter than the old mbr code which did
nothing more than initialise a few stack pointers, load code from a
fixed address into memory, and jump to that memory.

As already mentioned, the mbr also contains the partition table.
Clearing that will loose your partition information and nothing will
boot.

 
> 
> I hope this enlighten you a little.
> Ziyad.
> 
> 
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-- 
Regards,
Russ