How in the Tech

Backup and Restore your Master Boot Record

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 4, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Backups, System Administration

The Master Boot Record or MBR is unarguably the most critical component on your computer. In actuality, it isn’t exactly a component in the traditional sense, but rather more like a file that lives on the first sector of your harddrive – sector 0. The MBR is responsible for booting your computer. Should it become corrupt, either by a virus or other nefarious software, your computer becomes a rather expensive doorstop until it is corrected. In practice, it doesn’t even have to be a virus that wipes the MBR; users of multiple operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, on the same computer may have experienced a situation where one OS wipes out the MBR necessary to boot the other. Nevertheless, the MBR is crucial so it makes good computing sense to protect it.

HD Hacker is an extremely small, 20KB, free download for Windows that, on first reading, sounds like the exact opposite of what we are trying to accomplish. Thankfully, the software is of the helpful variety in that it can be used to backup and subsequently restore your Master Boot Record.

HD Hacker allows you to select the physical harddrive by drive letter and from there you are provide a couple options to backup or restore the MBR. To backup your MBR you would normally select your C: drive, choose Read sector from Disk, then Save sector to File. Afterwards, this file can be used to recover from a corrupt or otherwise alter MBR. Not a bad peice of mind in my opinion.