[nflug] Disk Image/Restore

Cyber Source peter at thecybersource.com
Tue Jul 25 16:01:29 EDT 2006


joshj at linuxmail.org wrote:
> When we last left our adventurers...
>
>>>
>>> Win98 must have some kind of "boot loader" (or equivilant) on the first
>>> 512 of the HD otherwise there would be nothing to pass control to the
>>> kernel, right?
>>>
>>> -Josh
>>>
>> No, again this is done in the partitioning. As long as the partition 
>> is made bootable (in fdisk on Linux, type a, then partition number). 
>> You will see an asterisk next to the partition number. You can put 
>> boot instructions anywhere, like install grub to a partition rather 
>> than the mbr, etc.. As long as your BIOS is set to hit the drive, 
>> then it sees the bootable partition, 98 takes over from there. 
>> Actually so does xp, etc.. I know this because we reuse drives all 
>> the time with different things on mbr's, etc.. If we say, put xp on a 
>> drive that previously had grub on the mbr, we could ghost, dd, tar 
>> the xp copy onto the drive and then it would fail to boot UNTIL we 
>> blank the mbr. You can do this in xp by booting with the cd and I 
>> think it's fixmbr from the rescue console (providing xp had an 
>> administrative password or you know it, plenty of hack tools out 
>> there to provide this and you actually NEED an administrative 
>> password for the administrator account to get to the rescue console). 
>> Then after you can install grub on the mbr and within grub's xp 
>> stanza, it nicely hands off to xp as though it's the only thing there 
>> (chainloader +1) and if it's on another drive, xp needs to be the 
>> first so you use the mapping in grub's stanzas "map (hd0) (hd1)" "map 
>> (hd1) (hd0)" because you know windows has to be the first and only 
>> drive on a box right? ;)
>
> Huh. I know win* does _something_ to my MBR. Because anytime I've 
> reinstalled any windows it overwrites it and I have to re-run grub
> if I want to get to Linux. But I didn't think that the bios
> was smart enough to look beyond the first HD sector for boot 
> information. So if I did a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 
> count=1" to get rid of my MBR and my windows partition is set to 
> bootable (and its the first partition) I could still boot windows?
>
> -Josh
>
>
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yes, that command is just blanking the mbr just like fixmbr (xp) and 
fdisk /mbr (dos/98)
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