How to Backup MBR - Master Boot Record

The MBR (master boot record) is located at cylinder 0, head 0, and sector 1. It's the very first sector of the hard drive and it is 512 bytes in size. When the BIOS boot your machine it looks in the MBR for information on your partitions and the initial boot loader. The MBR contains a partition table and boot code. The boot code executes and then transfers the process to the boot loader program on your active (bootable) partition.

We can take the backup of MBR either to a floppy disk or to a CDROM.

01. Backup to a floppy:

[root@daddylinux~]# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

02. Backup to CDR:

First, create the MBR backup to a file on your hard drive.

[root@daddylinux~]#dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.bak bs=512 count=1

Now, burn the file you just created to CDR.