Hi

Today I had some success. I got Vista and Win7 dual booting using XOSL using 3 partitions and PTS Disk Editor (to fix the disk signature). Have made backups (using Acronis True Image) of my Vista and Win7 partitions and everything seems just fine.

Now I'd like to back up my MBR to a different disk.

I'm using Ultimate Boot CD on a CD (not a flash drive). When running MBRTool and requesting to save the MBR it comes back with a permissions error. According to the MBRTool documentation (if I understand it correctly), it will save the MBR onto the same disk that MBRTool was started with.

Does this mean it's trying to save to the CD and thus giving the error?

How can I use MBRTool to back up to a different drive? And how can I restore from a different drive?

I've just thought that if I use UBCD on a flash drive - maybe that would work?

Any ideas would be most gratefully received...

Jack

Well I just created a bootable USB stick with UBCD on it and tried MBRTool and it now works just fine. Having made a backup of the MBR for a disk you can quit the program by pressing ESC and you end up at a C: prompt - the flash drive. Here you can now see the file with the MBR.

But I have another question.

MBRTool refers to your hard drives simply as a number starting at 0. I have 2 internal hard drives and disconnected all other external drives. MBRTool shows that I have 3 drives. One of these must be the USB drive.

So I guess I'm correct in thinking that
drive 0 is the USB drive
drive 1 is my main hard drive - the one with the MBR I'm trying to back up
drive 2 is my secondary hard drive - whose MBR I'm not concerned with

I want to try restoring my main drive MBR to make sure I know what I'm doing but dont want to restore the "wrong" MBR.

Are my assumptions above correct?

Just tried it out and when using a USB with UBCD on it and 2 internal hard drives...MBRTool recognises

Disk 0 - as the USB
Disk 1 - as the "first" hard drive (set up as boot drive in BIOS)
Disk 2 - as the "second" hard drive

I was able to backup, destroy and restore my MBR for my "first" hard drive.

This poses another question I suppose. If I reorder the boot sequence in the bios, so that now my computer boots from the "second" hard drive, how will MBRTool recognise the hard drives. I imagine it should be...

Disk 0 - as the USB
Disk 1 - as the "second" hard drive (set up as boot drive in BIOS)
Disk 2 - as the "first" hard drive

I guess the only way to find out is to try it out.