On Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:19:31 +0200, Tomas Kral wrote: > On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 14:06 +0200, Camaleón wrote: >> On Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:14:17 +1000, Andrew McGlashan wrote: >> >> > On Sat, July 30, 2011 6:40 am, Camaleón wrote: >> >>>>> One of my (home made) overnight cron jobs does this: >> >>>>> >> >>>>> dd if=/dev/sda \ >> >>>>> of=$DST/mbr_backup.bin \ >> >>>>> bs=512 \ >> >>>>> count=1 >> $LOG 2>&1 >> > >> > Okay, well this script isn't perfect and it sure won't help after the >> > problem, but it will save all possible MBRs and fdisk output for a >> > bunch of candidate disks: >> >> (...) >> >> This should be done _at install time_ when things can badly break. Once >> you've lost your MBR making a backup of the _wrong_ MBR is of course >> useless. >> >> > Not sure if I am quite in the subject. > > But in the old Potato days, the installer always asked to stick in a > floppy disk to write a new MBR on it. Leaving hard drive untouched.
Sure. The expert installer has the option to do not install any bootloader or to install it on a partition instead MBR. Not sure what happened to the OP but it seems that finally the MBR was replaced somehow. > Just in case something went wrong with the newly installed system, user > could always boot back in the old system, just by removing the floppy > from the drive. > > Also, there used to be command grub-floppy. Yes, there are many options available. For instance, I removed my notebook hard disk when I installed wheezy on external USB disk... just in case ;-) But regardless the option the user select at install time (do not install any bootloader, install it in a partition or another place or just putting it into MBR), it would be nice the installer makes a copy of the original MBR and leaves it under "/boot". Greetings, -- Camaleón -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/pan.2011.07.31.15.30...@gmail.com
