I am going to re-install windows soon.
I haven’t done it in years, and the amount of cruft that has built up over that time has slowly increased. I am usually pretty on the ball regarding system maintenance and hat not but some things have recently started to go quirky on me. Typical stuff like general unresponsive system, Skype won’t recognise my microphone, even though I can hear it coming through the speakers, blah blah.
The only problem is that I have Ubuntu installed on the first partition and Windows installed on the second. Windows has little respect for the master boot record (MBR), and will happily overwrite it when I re-install, so I need to do something so I can restore the MBR back to it’s original state after the Windows installation.
- Backup:
$dd if=/dev/hdx of=MBR-backup bs=512 count=1 - Restore:
$dd if=MBR-backup of=/dev/hdx bs=512 count=1
Alternatively just use a live-CD in rescue-mode and use grub-install to fix it up for you! (Details provided on same page as previous link – first comment)
