From: NoEMail@home.org   
      
   Mike Small  wrote:   
   > root  writes:   
   >   
   > Backing up the boot sector (mental note, back up my boot sectors) to a   
   > filesystem -- I prefer / to make it easy to find -- each time it changes   
   > would reduce your recovery to...   
   >   
   > dd if=/boot.sector.backup of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1   
   >   
   > I would back it up only to a filesystem on the hard drive where it   
   > exists. The usual considerations for backups motivating a separate drive   
   > or off site copy don't apply. You want only the most recent (non-corrupt   
   > -- a gotcha there?) bytes. If the drive goes, the root file system   
   > corrupts or is wiped, or if your apartment burns down then the sector is   
   > no longer useful.   
      
   I can't be sure to make such a backup when I am doing something that   
   involves the boot sector indirectly. Moreover, I would still have to   
   use Liveslak or something else to mount the drive and perform   
   the dd restoration.   
      
   >   
   > Using grub the backup is slightly more complicated. Its first stage   
   > lives where exactly?  Somewhere between the MBR boot sector and the   
   > first sector of the first partition? So dd out some number of the first   
   > N sectors up to but not including the beginning of the first partition?   
   > Or up to and including its PBR if you use and want to preserve that?   
   > Off by one errors here could be really annoying.   
      
   When I lose the grub boot sector I fall back to a fixed set of   
   commands which I keep on a file card under my monitor (which I   
   can't seem to find now so I can't reveal the commands).   
   >   
   > One thing I've been doing is to make each operating system on my disk   
   > boot from its PBR if possible.  So Slackware 14.2 (I have 15.0 on   
   > another machine with no multibooting and a GPT partition table) boots   
   > with lilo from its PBR. Grub is set up from Debian using all the gunk   
   > they have to detect everything and create boot entries, these being   
   > bootable directly from the Grub installed in the MBR + early sectors.   
   > My custom Grub configuration includes chain loaders to Slackware and   
   > NetBSD's PBR bootloaders. I also have an inactive Grub configuration on   
   > the Slackware partition that is, I hope, more or less up to date, in   
   > case I erased Debian. The Slackware PBR would be bootable with a simple   
   > fdisk /mbr and active flag if needed. Once into the Slackware area (via   
   > lilo on the PBR) I could run grub-mkconfig to get the other things   
   > booting again.  So there's some redundancy but probably too much   
   > complexity.   
      
   I don't understand most of the previous paragraph.   
   >   
   > There's also grub-mkrescue.   
   >   
   > - Mike Sm.   
      
   Thanks for responding Mike.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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