Backup And Restore MBR

Virus's, Windows mess up, whatever the reason we all know its nice to have a backup of your master boot record. And its also nice to be able to restore that master boot record. Heres how.

Save the MBR

To make a backup of your MBR, run the following command as root

dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR.dump bs=512 count=1

If you do not know the path to your hard drive, fdisk -l can help you.

Restore MBR

To restore the MBR is a little less straightforward because you have to do it using a liveCD. Download and boot up your favorite linux livecd, open up a terminal window type the following.

sudo dd if=MBR.dump of=/dev/sda