On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 10:01:02AM +0000, Bill Hill wrote:
Chris G wrote:
However what worries me slightly is that there is presumably an MBR (that's what DOS used to call it) on /dev/sda which the BIOS goes to when the system is powered up. If I repartition /dev/sda will I lose this boot record? How does this get created in the Linux way of doing things?
Which bootloader are you using? Usually grub, which would mean: grub_install /dev/sda
But.....
My existing Fedora installation (using grub as you say) is on /dev/sdb with /dev/sdb1 being mounted as /boot for grub etc.
So if I (say) completely repartitioned and reformatted /dev/sda would I lose the MBR that tells the system to boot from /boot on /dev/sdb? If it wouldn't reboot then I can't run grub.
... and wouldn't "grub-install /dev/sda" expect a boot partition or something on /dev/sda, there might not be one.
Lilo, just rerun. And there should be a backup in /boot/boot_mbr (or something like that) which you could dd if=/boot/boot_mbr of=/dev/sda but only if everything else fails and your data's safe on another drive.
None of the documentation I can find tells how the MBR relates to the rest of the boot process if it's on a different drive.