Fixing a MBR (and more) that ??? trashed

Alex Zbyslaw xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Wed Sep 14 01:59:18 PDT 2005


Gayn Winters wrote:

>>Alex Zbyslaw [mailto:xfb52 at dial.pipex.com] 
>>    
>>
>>Why do you think it's not safe to add hard drives?
>>    
>>
>
>It doesn't seem "safe" if Windows blows away the multiboot MBR that
>FreeBSD so carefully made!  Windows overwriting the MBR seems to be the
>reason people recommend loading Windows before loading FreeBSD, which I
>do.  I just never realized that this problem would come back to bite me
>when I added another disk drive.
>  
>
I know of know reason why it should.  I've added disks half a dozen 
times without blowing away any MBRs.  Even the Windows blowing away the 
MBR is an annoyance, not a disaster since it is easy to rewrite.  
Whatever pickle you find yourself in seems to have to do with more than 
just adding a disk or Windows killing your MBR.

>I need to be able to operate on my clients' disks.  Sometimes I need a
>tool that runs under Windows, and other times I need a tool that runs
>under FBSD.  This doesn't permit adding an OS to their disks. 
>
I don't really understand what you're saying here; sorry.  Dual boot 
machines are really common (I have three here) and despite adding disks 
to each of them at some point in their lives, I've never ended up with 
anything going wrong.

> A
>bootable external USB drive may be the ideal "Fixit" drive ...  Of
>course, I'd rather figure out how not to have the problem at all!  It
>would be nice if FreeBSD could write out whatever changes to the MBR and
>the partition/slice tables that the new hardware required so that
>Windows didn't feel obligated to "fix" things.
>  
>
FreeBSD can do that.  I'm not denying that you're in a pickle, but that 
is not a necessary consequence of adding a disk.

--Alex





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