christ rod, why it that any simple correspondence with you soon grows to

a multipart multimegabyte production. its just like michael chan all

over again.



 RS> You have now been backpedalling furiously trying to preserve some vestige

 RS> of credibility when its shown clearly that FDISK /MBR aint anything like

 RS> as dangerous as you allege.



if thats what you want to think rod, then go ahead, i'd be hard put to

backpedal as hard as you are though over the great message quoter (-8



 KR> it is not a bad idea for anybody who places any reliance on a computer

 KR> to have a sensible strategy for recovery, full backup is not viable

 KR> for most,



 RS> Well, you can make a far better case for a backup of the stuff that you

 RS> have produced or changed yourself, including various config files of

 RS> commercial software, than you can for a copy of JUST the boot sector.



where have i ever said that you should just back up the boot sector? it

is just part of a sensible  scheme of precautions. why spend a couple of

days restoring all your software, just because you had to do a full

fdisk to get over a boot sector problem when you could have spent 2 min

to save it , and 2 min to restore it. of course you keep the other stuff

too, unless either you dont give a shit about what you have on your

system, or you are like poe and spend the best part of 2 grand on a dat

unit and back the lot up. you devise a sensible strategy of giving

yourself the maximum chance of recovery for the least effort. since you

agree that having a nortons rescue  disk is a good idea, you obvously

agree, even if you dont say so.



 RS> You can do whatever you like Keith. But what you were actually doing was

 RS> claiming a risk in using the FDISK /MBR which was fanciful.



so you still say that there is NO risk at all? nothing can possibly go

wrong? ever?



                        Keith



--- PPoint 1.86