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Author Topic: A stand-alone exe to save and restore the MBR  (Read 4593 times)

MilesAhead

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A stand-alone exe to save and restore the MBR
« on: April 17, 2009, 06:25 PM »
As floppy disks are a thing of the past, a simple utility to save and restore the MBR seems tougher to find.  It should be able to run in a Dos box so when you boot a WinPE based CD you can run the exe straight from a USB key or whatever.  I found one called HDHacker, but it's implemented in VB.  I can't figure out how to add my disk drivers to WinPE so I don't really want to add the hassle of adding VB run-time on top of it. (I can, however, load my RAID disk drivers manually once the WinPE is loaded using Drvload.)

If anyone knows of an already existing one that isn't stuck away in a Dos boot image I'd appreciate it.

Right now as a stop gap I'm using the trick of a single file in a "dummy partition" and backing that up with Macrium Reflect.  At the end of the restore I have the option to write the MBR from the backup to the HD.  It does the job, but it's kind of a silly way to do something so basic. :)
« Last Edit: April 17, 2009, 06:26 PM by MilesAhead »

PhilB66

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Re: A stand-alone exe to save and restore the MBR
« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2009, 07:11 PM »

MilesAhead

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Re: A stand-alone exe to save and restore the MBR
« Reply #2 on: April 17, 2009, 11:11 PM »
Thanks for the reply.  :)
I have my USB MBR rescue key all set up now.
btw in case it would be helpful to anyone else, I found a nice
line by line how to set up a bootable USB key drive if you have
WinPE(probably also works for VistaPE I would guess).  It shows
all the commands to clean, format, and mark active the USB key
and copy the WinPE file structure on with xcopy:

Create bootable WinPE USB key