Best Way To Protect Your MBR?

[TheRollbackFrog]

Originally Posted by Brian K

I think most imaging apps do that. Ghost 2003 doesn't do it. I know the TeraByte apps backup the First Track (LBA-0 to LBA-62) whenever a partition image is created. Any partition image. C: drive, D: drive, etc. You can choose to restore the First Track if you desire. But by design, the partition table is not backed up.

Hi Brian! I always had a different read on that. I felt the IFW backed up the entire Track 0, incl. the partition table, but did not restore it (partition table) unless specifically asked to do so.

For instance when restoring Track 0 using AUTO, all the necessary pieces of the MBR would be restored but not the PT. If I explicitly asked it to restore sector 0 from the Track 0 save, indeed I thought the PT along with the rest of the MBR would be restored.

Did I understand that wrong?

[Brian K]

TRF,

I recall you posted about this topic a few months ago and I agreed with all of your points. I've just had another look at the restore Options for a partition image restore. AUTO is greyed out so the default is none of the First Track is restored. If you select Restore First Track, AUTO becomes active.

I restored a partition image with Restore First Track selected but I didn't select Restore Disk Signature. A Disk Editor showed the original bootstrap code, the Disk Signature and the EMBR had been restored. There was a partition entry for the restored partition. Maybe this is where our thoughts differ. By saying the Partition Table wasn't restored I was referring to the other partitions on the HD that hadn't been backed up. The only partition that appears in the partition table on the new HD is the partition that has been restored.

A nice restore feature is the use of 0 (zero) instead of AUTO. 0 doesn't mean LBA-0 is restored. It means all sectors in the First track are restored. Actually it restores the first 128 sectors and gets around the Grub2 issue of having the first 123 sectors in use. Again, the partition table only shows the partition that has been restored.

The situation is quite different if you restore an Entire Drive image. The Partition Table is restored.

[TheRollbackFrog]

Ahhhhhhhh... "I see" said the blind man. Thanks for the clarification.

[Brian K]

For those who own IFL....

boot from the IFL CD
copy the MBR on HD0 to a flash drive
TBOSDT
copy sectors 0 0 63 mbr0
exit
use mnt1 to mount the flash drive partition
use Terminal to copy mbr0 (doesn't need a file extension) to the flash drive. Use this line ...
cp /tbu/mbr0 /tbu/mnt1

to restore the MBR backup (on the USB flash drive) to HD0
the flash drive is seen in IFL as a HD so (if the partition on the flash drive is /dev/sdc1 then the flash drive is HD 2)
list HD 2 to get the Partition ID. It should be 0x1
open fs 1: 2 0x1
copy sectors 0 0 63 1:mbr0 --w