Guest drslush Posted February 5, 2003 Report Share Posted February 5, 2003 I currently have XP Pro installed on my primary drive. I have a second (slave) drive which I will be formatting and installing Mandrake on. I plan on putting the bootloader on my primary. My concern is in reference to the MBR. Is the partition table located in the MBR? If so, do I have to worry about losing my partition table if I need to restore my MBR to its prior state? I currently have two partitions on my master drive. I was also wondering: I wrote a program that makes a copy of the MBR. If I copy this file back later, (from the Win XP MBR) will everything be as it was? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtweidmann Posted February 5, 2003 Report Share Posted February 5, 2003 No the partition table is seperate. The MBR just tells the computer where the OS is. As to your other question, I have no idea if copying the file back will work. For win95/98 you only had to format the mbr with a boot disk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuzzylizard Posted February 5, 2003 Report Share Posted February 5, 2003 I am not sure if I can answer your specific questions, However, I have Mandrake 9.0 and Windows 2000 installed on the same computer. I have done this install with win2k on the master drive and linux on the slave drive and I have done it with both on the same drive. In both cases, nothing was lost. Mandrake recognized the windows operating system and installed LILO properly to support the dual boot. (I have not used grub so I can not comment on it. However, I expect it would behave the same) Removing LILO from the MBR can be a more problematic. However, the following command will remove it and restore your MBR to its originial state. # lilo -u I have used this command in the past with windows 2000 and it has always returned the mbr to its originial windows state -- you would never know that linux was ever on the computer. However, with all that said, anytime you install a new operating system, whether dual boot or not, it is a good idea to do a backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest drslush Posted February 5, 2003 Report Share Posted February 5, 2003 Thank you for the response, you answered my question. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted February 5, 2003 Report Share Posted February 5, 2003 I would save two copies of the mbr before and after the Mandrake install. Right at the end of the MBR, there is some partition information but short of erasing the MBR, you should not be too concerned about this and I cannot look at it because my only sector editor is Norton on the Windows side. If it should come to pass that you shoud need to put XP back in shape, there is another way other than replacing the MBR with the saved one. This involves using the XP Recovery Console and is described in KB article # Q307654 at the M$ support site. I would also look for software to save the partition tables but I can't help you here because I just though of that and I need to find the software myself. This is not the easy issue that some might think because of the widespread use of various journalling file systems in Linux and the use of new file type numbers assigned to them. Counterspy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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