Saving the MBR by "dd"?

[Kurt Underhay]

Hi Peter

The reply that has already been sent is correct i.e. bs=512, count=1.

Do your FC3 and hoary installations share a boot partition, or are their 
respective /boot directories contained within hda5 and hda6? Because if 
the latter is the case, then they won't be able to speak to each other.

BTW - I seem to recall that XP Pro doesn't play havoc with the MBR as 
much as previous versions of Windows did, but of course it is definitely 
a good idea to back up anyway.

Peter Baumgartner wrote:
> Hi,
> this is a question to the more experienced users:
> I have a triple boot machine (XP on hda1, FC3 on hda5 and hoary on hda6 
> + /documents on hde). The XP is my playground ;-) and is getting 
> terribly slow, so I would like to re-install it. Because the GRUBs of  
> ubuntu and Fedora Core seem not to understand each other (are they 
> talking different languages??), I had to manually edit the "menu.list" 
> to get it working. To overcome the well known "advantages" of Windoze in 
> respect of the MBR I want to save it before the Win$ installation and 
> re-write it by "dd".
> What parameters do I need ( BS=?   length=?)? Can anybody help me with 
> this?
> Thanks in advance
> 
> Peter
>