Master Boot Record Issues

[jgutty]

Well, I now use MDK 9.1 much more that Windoze, so I figured that I would reload windoze on a smaller partition, making more disc space available for MDK.

 

Knowing that this would monkey with my mbr (on hda), I found that I can either make a boot disc to restore lilo on the mbr by booting from that disc and issuing /sbin/lilo, or make a copy of the mbr to restore.

 

I have /home reasonably well backed-up in case I get in other trouble otherwise.

 

However, I cannot make a boot disc, it won''t fit on a 1.44 mb drive......so i figured that I would just do the other and make a copy of the mbr....

 

I put a blank floppy in fd0 , and as root I enter:

 

# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0/mbr.bin bs=512 count=1

 

I'm not certain what this means, but page 161 of my starter guide for MDK9.1 tells me to do this.

 

But it does not work. I get:

 

dd: opening `/dev/fd0/mbr.bin': Not a directory

 

As a result.

 

Anybody have any other ideas?

 

Thanks.

[Ixthusdan]

Don't worry about it. load windex and use the first cd to reinstall lilo. Boot with the disk, at the splash screen hit F1, type "rescue" and reinstall lilo. If you want, save your lilo.conf to your home directory (I usually re-name it lilo.back) and use it later. But bear in mind that the windex partitions will be at different locations, so edit accordingly.

[jgutty]

I saw that part about using rescue in the faq section, but the MDK guide is pretty specific that I need to make a boot disc, so I was leery.

 

Thanks for the lilo backup idea.