> Sometimes I have seen it suggested in cases of corrupted mbr's that the > user write zeros to the MBR with dd. This will certainly stop the machine > booting
It damn well sure will stop your machine booting. NULLING OUT THE MBR WILL ALSO NULL OUT YOUR PRIMARY PARTITION TABLE. Of course it depends on how big you define "MBR". With 512 bytes (the standard block size) you've had it. The partition table is somewhere in the second half of the MBR block. The MBR will be unbootable after nulling the first 8 bytes, if it even takes that much, if that is your primary objective. Installing grub into the MBR should always give a bootable dual-boot system if Linux is installed last. I haven't seen it fail, though with modern disk geometries and an older bios booting Linux might fail without a partition for /boot which is placed completely within the first 1024 cylinders of the disk. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
