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Bootsector HD

A bootsector that's installed on a harddrive is the same as one that's on a Floppy Disk. The BIOS will look only on the first harddrive for a bootsector. You can back up the old bootsector so that you can restore it.

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49 views1 page

Bootsector HD

A bootsector that's installed on a harddrive is the same as one that's on a Floppy Disk. The BIOS will look only on the first harddrive for a bootsector. You can back up the old bootsector so that you can restore it.

Uploaded by

GameAlert
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Copying Your Bootsector to a Harddrive

Copying Your Bootsector to a Harddrive


First, you should read the Copying Your Bootsector to a Floppy Disk tutorial if you haven't yet.

The requirements for a bootsector that's installed on a harddrive are the same as those for a bootsector on a
floppy:

1. Your bootsector is exactly 512 bytes long.


2. Your bootsector ends with 0xAA55.
3. Your bootsector is compiled as a flat binary.

Now, the BIOS(Basic Input Output Sytem) will look only on the first harddrive for a bootsector(most BIOSes
do this, though apperently some allow you to chose which harddrive to look on) so we need to copy our
bootsector to the first harddrive. In Linux, the first harddrive is /dev/hda and in PartCopy, it is h0.

Copying Under Windows With PartCopy


This is is pretty much the same as copying a bootsector to a floppy disk with PartCopy(in this example the
bootsector is called bootsec.bin):

partcopy bootsec.bin 0 200 -h0

We start at the very beginning of the first harddrive(the first harddrive is specified with the -h0) and continue
to the 512 byte mark(512 bytes = 0x200).

Before you do that, you might want to back up the old bootsector so that you can restore it. The command
below saves the old bootsector into a file called oldboot.bin:

partcopy -h0 0 200 oldboot.bin

Copying Under Linux With dd


First, our bootsector is called bootsec.bin. Under Linux, the first harddrive is /dev/hda. We want to write our
bootsector as one block of 512 bytes. bs=512 sets up the size of 1 block and count=1 specifies that we want
to only write 1 block:

dd if=bootsec.bin of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

Before you do that, you might want to back up the old bootsector so that you can restore it. The command
below saves the old bootsector into a file called oldboot.bin:

dd if=/dev/hda of=oldboot.bin bs=512 count=1

This tutorial was written by K.J. - May 6, 2002

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