Linux Backup Restore Destroy and Install MBR - Master Boot Record

Last Updated on Friday, 09 April 2010 08:41

Here are some usefull hints on how to Backup Restore Destroy and Install MBR on linux. If the need comes to backup, restore and destroy your MBR you can use a dd command to do that job. First we need to find find our storage device to backup MBR. To do that use a command:

fdisk -l 

Let's assume that the storage device we want to work with is /dev/hdb.

WARNING: DO NOT COPY AND PASTE COMMANDS FROM THIS PAGE UNLESS YOUR DEVICE IS ALSO /dev/sdb !!

1. BACKUP MBR

To backup Master Boot Record ( MBR ):

# dd if=/dev/sdb of=my.mbr bs=466 count=1

where my.mbr is a file where we would like to store our MBR backup.

2. RESTORE MBR

To restore a MBR we need to just switch the order of input and output files.

# dd if=my.mbr of=/dev/sdb bs=466 count=1

3. DESTROY MBR

If you from any reason want to destroy your MBR us as a input file /dev/zero:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=466 count=1

4. INSTALL MBR

Installing MBR can be very useful especially when creating linux USB boot sticks. To install MBR from scratch we can use install-mbr command found in mbr package:

# install-mbr /dev/sdb

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