On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 10:48:36AM -0700, Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
Are there any tools for working with and moving or copying the MBR?
My machine has 2 PATA drives (hda & hdb) and 2 SATA drives (sda & sdb). The MBR is on hda,
Actually, its on every drive. The BIOS just boots the first it cans (by a configurable order).
but I would like (eventually or sooner) to boot from sda because it is two years newer, faster and, hopefully, more reliable. Even if I don't change that, I'd like a backup MBR on sda in case hda fails (hdb has gone sour a few times due to something in the power setup, although no data lost and it always comes back).
In order to copy the MBR, I'd also need to edit it because the drive configuration would be different, as well as the location of my /boot partition.
So you don't want to backup hda's MBR to sda, you just want to also be able to boot from sda.
So, you'll need to create the extra boot partition on sda, format it, copy /boot data to the new one, umount /boot; mount newboot /boot; and then, depending on your boot loader:
a) lilo: 1. change boot=/dev/hda to boot=/dev/sda (in /etc/lilo.conf) 2. make sure disk=/dev/sda exists and is correct (also in /etc/lilo.conf) 3. lilo -v
b) grub: 1. make sure /boot/grub/device.map has the correct value for sda 2. change (hd0) to the sda device in /boot/grub/menu.lst 3. execute grub-install /dev/sda
Note that disk= and device.map specifies the device name on boot. If you change the BIOS boot order to boot sda first, then sda will still be bios=0x80 (lilo) and (hd0) (grub).
Anyway, I just recomend the creation of a boot cd with /boot and fix /boot when the need arrives.