Posted by yolau

In this article I will be explaining how to backup the MBR record of a hard-drive.
The MBR record contains the partition table and bootloader.

Having a backup of the MBR is useful in case you want to copy data from an older drive to a new one or in case you want to restore data from a damaged drive.
How to backup the MBR record

dd if=/dev/sdX of=MBR.bck bs=512 count=1

Please note that you have to replace /dev/sdX with your actual drive. This can be /dev/sda, /dev/hda, etc.

How to restore de MBR record

dd if=MBR.bck of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1

Again you have to replace /dev/sdX with your actual drive.

If you also want to keep a human readable copy of the partition table you can run:

fdisk -l > part.table

I hope it helps !

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