Jarry wrote:
Is it not possible to archive MBR too? That way I could save 5. and 6., and to automate it with some scripts...
Technically, yes, I guess you could do this. Although, I don't know if I would really recommend it.
If you are using a stage 1.5 with grub, you would need to archive the first 63 blocks of the disk (technically fewer than that, but you would have to check grub-install's output to be sure of the exact count, and 63 is the safe number). This is because grub embeds the stage1.5 loader after the mbr (first block) and the start of the first partition.
If you are not using the stage 1.5, or you are using lilo, then you have little choice but to reinstall the boot loader. This is because some files in /boot are block mapped into the mbr, and the restore process may have changed the layout of these files, so the block map will be incorrect.
I think the safest route is to always let the system write a fresh mbr. -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
