On (11 Jul 94) Rod Speed wrote to Keith Richardson...



 KR> i think that, had paul had realised what was actually being done,

 KR> he would have done what i would also have done, and backed up the

 KR> boot sector before doing the fdisk /mbr.



 PE> No, I wouldn't back up the boot sector.



 KR> in the case of losing the boot sector, you will lose your partition

 KR> information, and i have yet to see a recovery from that that doesnt

 KR> destroy all the data on the disk,



 RS> Thats going a bit far. If you know the partition layout you can restore

 RS> it from memory. Trivial if the drive has one partition for example. And

 RS> trial and error is possible in some cases without losing data.



you seem to have missed the point completely, i have no doubt that the

partition table could be rebuilt, if (big if) you happen to know from

which to which cylinder each partition on your hard disk goes. i have no

idea what they are on my disks, but why would you bother when all you

need to do is to take a copy of the boot sector once only straight after

you do the first fdisk when you set the system up. the boot sector is

one thing on your disk that should never change, so, to my mind, an

extra 2 minutes spent when setting up a system are well spent even if

you never need to use it.



 KR> and the cost of precautions is so low, one floppy, and about 2 minutes

 KR> work.



 RS> Yes, its no big deal. OTOH I think its pretty anal retentive to be doing

                                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 RS> it before you do an FDISK /MBR for the microscopic risk of a power

 RS> failure just at the instant when that can scramble the sector. It really

 RS> is a microscopic risk. I dont believe most people bother.



i assume that anal retentive is your new catch phrase, given up welp?

(-8



i dont suppose that many people do bother, thats ok, it is the sort of

thing that brings me extra work. of course you dont do it just to guard

against problems with fdisk /mbr, not 0.005% of the population ever use

it even now that M$ admit to it's existence, paul's case is the only one

that i have ever come across where it has done something useful. there

are plenty of other things that can stuff the boot sector, from disk

failure to virusses. even then boot sector corruption is not common, it

is just that it is so easy to guard against and the consiquences are so

disruptive. norton's disktools will even do it all for you, and save the

cmos at the same time, no need for a user to get his/her hands dirty

with having to get down to copying physical sectors.



 RS> Sure, its not a bad idea for people like us who do lots of work on

 RS> drives. I do the same thing but use other stuff instead of disk mangler.

 RS> Thats a completely different question to saving the sector before an

 RS> FDISK/ MBR tho.



you seem to have the fdisk /mbr on the brain, at one time, there were

cluedos in knowing of it's existance, but these days every competent pc

user knows about it. if you actually read the whole of what i wrote, you

would have seen that i was advocating the backing up of the boot sector

as a sensible precaution in general not to do just before an fdisk /mbr.

if you have a copy of your boot sector, you don't need to do an fdisk

/mbr anyway as you will be in possession of a good boot sector that you

can restore. there is much less point in saving something that is rooted

to start with, although it is better than nothing. it is not a bad idea

for anybody who places any reliance on a computer to have a sensible

strategy for recovery, full backup is not viable for most, but, if i set

up a system for people, i try to show them how to get the best chance of

recovery for the least effort.



                        Keith



--- PPoint 1.86


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