On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 17:30 +0200, Camaleón wrote: > 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 >> $LOG 2>&1 > >> > > >> > Okay, well this script isn't perfect and it sure won't help after the > >> > problem, but it will save all possible MBRs and fdisk output for a > >> > bunch of candidate disks: > >> > >> (...) > >> > >> This should be done _at install time_ when things can badly break. Once > >> you've lost your MBR making a backup of the _wrong_ MBR is of course > >> useless. > >> > >> > > Not sure if I am quite in the subject. > > > > But in the old Potato days, the installer always asked to stick in a > > floppy disk to write a new MBR on it. Leaving hard drive untouched. > > Sure. The expert installer has the option to do not install any > bootloader or to install it on a partition instead MBR. Not sure what > happened to the OP but it seems that finally the MBR was replaced somehow. > > > Just in case something went wrong with the newly installed system, user > > could always boot back in the old system, just by removing the floppy > > from the drive. > > > > Also, there used to be command grub-floppy. > > Yes, there are many options available. For instance, I removed my > notebook hard disk when I installed wheezy on external USB disk... just > in case ;-) > > But regardless the option the user select at install time (do not install > any bootloader, install it in a partition or another place or just > putting it into MBR), it would be nice the installer makes a copy of the > original MBR and leaves it under "/boot". > > Greetings, > > -- > Camaleón > >
Good thinking, I just found tcat@lynx:~$ /usr/sbin/grub-floppy --help This program is broken, unsupported upstream, and has been deprecated in favour of grub-mkrescue (grub-pc package) grub-mkrescue looks like a new tool to create a rescue image I have no experience with it so far, not sure if this one is present at install time, and if it makes sense at all Also my Squeeze CD-ROM has got option boot-rescue, I can only guess user can do MBR maintenance there Since Potato (my first Debian installation), I keep two installations on my system, stable / testing, I boot into testing from Stable using grub. When testing becomes stable enough I upgrade it to stable, and after a while old stable gives room to a new testing. It works good for me, I can always look back and see what setup I had before, and what I might have been missing in the new system. This requires more partions of HD. /boot is a separate partition on my system, it has kernel images there Also in Patato and later I had to have custom kernels under /boot there because my hardware was experimental at that time and not all drivers were present in default flavour I still remember flavours (Vanilla, IDE, Laptop, etc.) Now everything seems single monolithic kernels by platform focus point In the process I have always rescue CDs, used to be rescue floppies though, now possibly becoming rescue USBs :=) -- Tomas Kral <thomas.k...@email.cz> -- 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/1312127877.4755.23.camel@lynx.localhost.localdomain
