On Fri, 28 Dec 2001, Dave Ihnat wrote: > Yep. I was just responding to the comment that "/mbr" doesn't work, and > the probable cause (wrong system, wrong argument order).
i'm perpetually amused by the number of people who want to turn their linux boxes back into MS boxes but, hey, to each his own. however, there is one option that people can try before reaching for the DOS boot disks. if you've installed linux and selected LILO as the boot loader, an image of the previous MBR is automatically backed up in the file /boot/boot.xxyy, where xx and yy represent the major and minor device numbers of the hard drive (3,0 for /dev/hda, 8,0 for /dev/sda). if you have such a file, it's easy to # hexdump -cx /boot/boot.xxyy to see if it still has the characters "MS-DOS 5.0" or something to that effect near the beginning. if that's the case, you can always # dd if=/boot/boot.xxyy of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 (or /dev/sda) to restore *just* *the* *boot* *code*. if you want to take a shortcut, the "lilo" command has a "-u" option for uninstall, which does the same thing. (i'm not aware that GRUB has such a feature.) note well that, if you've installed more than once, the truly original boot code has been overwritten, so it's back to the DOS disks. but all of this brings up a few questions: 1) even on ny GRUB-driven box, is there a reason my MBR still has the "LILO" string in it? i guess there are parts of the MBR that GRUB does not overwrite. 2) is there, somewhere on the net, a copy of the MS-DOS boot code that a person could download to avoid needing DOS disks? 3) should i post a complete writeup on this entire issue, since i wrote it up once upon a time and stashed it somewhere. dang it, it's around here somewhere ... rday -- Robert P. J. Day Eno River Technologies, Chapel Hill NC Unix, Linux and Open Source corporate training _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
