[ale] MBR rebuilder ?

[John M. Mills]

On Mon, 6 Jul 1998, Jacob Langseth wrote:
> On Monday, July 06, 1998 6:19 PM, Nomad the Wanderer [SMTP:nomad at orci.com] 
> wrote:
> > Anyone here willing to write a proggy that given a -r will read the
> > contents of the mbr and given a -w will write it back so I don't have
> > to go through the rescue disk stuff to rebuild my box?  It wouldn't be
> > such a big deal, but I don't have a floppy in it right now...

> One possibility would be to create a boot/root disk (ala
> ancient slackware) and stick dd on it.
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 block_size=512 count=1, iirc

(1) I expect that you mean something you could run from DOS, since
    (a) you'll just have installed Win@#$!! and now can't boot Linux, and
    (b) Win@#$!! won't allow you to get at the mbr (except 'fdisk /mbr'),
    which means you'll have to reboot from a floppy in any case, no?
(2) You _did_ make a boot floppy didn't you? For my RH4.2:
    # cd /boot
    # dd if=vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0

I would just boot from that floppy and run lilo.  Looks about as simple to
me as a trick DOS utility to clean your Windows. 

  John M. Mills, Senior Research Engineer -- john.mills at gtri.gatech.edu
  Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0834
        Phone contacts: 404.894.0151 (voice), 404.894.6285 (FAX)
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