Re: restoring MBR

[Walter Hurry <walterhurry@lavabit.com>]

On Fri, 29 Jul 2011 20:15:42 +0000, Camaleón wrote:

> On Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:52:46 +0000, Walter Hurry wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:04:42 +0000, Camaleón wrote:
> 
> (...)
> 
>>> You noticed the first file (backup_mbr)? It is exactly what it seems
>>> but I cannot find such a file in Debian systems :-?
>> 
>> One of my (home made) overnight cron jobs does this:
>> 
>> dd if=/dev/sda \
>>         of=$DST/mbr_backup.bin \
>>         bs=512 \
>>         count=1 >> $LOG 2>&1
> 
> Good, but there is no cron job at install time :-P
> 
> I mean, ideally, the installer should perform automatically a backup of
> the MBR for all of the detected hard disks "just in case". What the user
> does afterwards is not the business of the operating system (while I
> agree that having a copy of the MBR is a very good idea).

I beg (politely) to disagree. IMHO it is up to the user/administrator to 
determine, implement and test the required backup strategy. The MBR is 
just a very small part of that.