How To Backup The MBR (Hard Disk Partition Table) With dd

The disk dump, dd command is awesome. It can be used for creating backups, copying files, even for writting CDs or DVDs.

In this article I will show you how to backup your MBR (Master Boot Record) with dd.

So, backup the Partition Table (or MBR), for /dev/sdb:

# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/root/sdambr.bak bs=512 count=1

If you damage the Partition Table, you can easily restore it, with the same dd command, on /dev/sdb:

# dd if=/root/sdambr.bak of=/dev/sdb bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446

/dev/sda represents the first S-ATA or SCSI hard disk and  /dev/sdb the second S-ATA or SCSI hard disk. Read more about hard disk representations here.