[ale] My boot sector looks dead.

[Chris Ness]

"Jeremy T. Bouse" wrote:
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> On Sat, 2 Jan 1999, Mike Kachline wrote:
> > From: Mike Kachline <kachline at medept17.coon.gatech.edu>
> > To: Ben Phillips <pynk at cc.gatech.edu>, ale at ale.org
> > Subject: Re: [ale] My boot sector looks dead.
> >       Given that you've got LILO installed in your boot sector, the way I've
> > always gotten through this problem is to boot my trusty DOS 6.22 boot disk and
> > "fdisk /mbr", then boot/root into Linux and re-install LILO. This won't blow
> > away your partitions, but it'll get rid of any defunct LILO in your MBR.
> >
> >       <BTW. If anyone else knows of a good *linux* way to do "fdisk /mbr",
> > please post! I would really love to know. >
DOS 6 is a special case see `man fdisk`. Dos 5 or lower might be better.
>         From my experience the method you've described is the easiest way
> provided you have a DOS boot disk with fdisk on it handy... As for a Linux
> way to do the same... Speaking from Debian-ville, when you install LILO it
> makes a copy of the the boot sector and stores it in /boot as
> boot.<Major><Minor> so my boot sector for my first partition on my first
> IDE drive is stored as /boot/boot.0301... If memory serves me right you can
> copy this back to the drive using dd if you know the right command line
> options... The file itself is 512 bytes...

Jeremy:
In your case the command would be: (presuming the hard drive is your
first ide)

`dd if=/boot/boot.0301 of=/dev/hda1 bs=512`

Instinct would tell me it was /dev/hda, but I had to un-DOS a hard drive
yesterday and the 
`man fdisk` had specified the 1 ... and it worked. BTW, if you ever try
to reformat an HD under DOS and get the `incorrect DOS version` error,
it's Linux to the rescue there too.

The Debian idea of a backup sounds like a great idea, I think I'll make
one. I guess I just reverse the if & of. How 'bout that, Slackware's got
'em too but by the date they've been there quite a while. 

-- 
Chris Ness
mailto:cness at gloster.vivid.net   	      All jobs are equally easy to
http://www.vivid.net/~gloster               the person not doing the
work.
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