Back Up the MBR ??

In another thread someone alluded that if I had a drive with multiple partitions & backed up the active boot partition that the MBR would not be backed up.

Is this true?

If the existing dos instalation fails or becomes corrupted & I restore from TI9's hidden boot sector or bootable media will this be a problem?

If so short of an entire hard drive b/u how do I protect the MBR?


Eds
Thx

 

Hello Eds,

Not an allusion but fact!!

It becomes a problem if the original MBR becomes corrupted or your original hard drive fails and you need to restore to a replacement.

I'm not sure what you mean by "protect the MBR" but you can repair it. If using Windows XP, either boot into the Recovery Console from the Windows installation CD and issue the command fixmbr or download the "mbrautowrite" utility as detailed in the Acronis Support Sticky titled <Please Read Before You Post> (note that the floppy version of this file is a self extracting zip that copies the necessary files onto a formatted floppy). If, on the other hand, you're using Windows 9x/Me, then boot into Recovery Console from the appropriate Windows installation CD and issue the command fdisk /mbr.

Regards

 

Actually you can protect an MBR if your BIOS supports it. It is usually refereed to as some kind of anti-virus option in the BIOS. It assumes that anything modifying the MBR might be a virus.

I never used this option before so I don't know what happens when a program like TI does try to replace it. Might be more trouble then it's worth to turn on this feature.