Hack and / - When Disaster Strikes: Restoring a Master Boot Record

The following is a continuation of a series of columns on Linux disasters and how to recover from them, inspired in part by a Halloween Linux Journal Live episode titled “Horror Stories”. You can watch the original episode at www.linuxjournal.com/video/linux-journal-live-horror-stories.

I have to admit, I've learned more about how Linux works by breaking it and fixing it, than I have by any other method. There really is nothing quite like the prospect of losing valuable data, or the idea that your only computer won't boot, to motivate you to learn more about your system. In this month's installment of “When Disaster Strikes”, I discuss a surprisingly small part of your computer that plays a surprisingly large role in booting and using it—the Master Boot Record, or MBR for short. I cover some of my favorite ways to destroy an MBR and a few ways to restore it once you have.

Before you can fully understand how to restore the MBR, you should have a good idea of what it actually is. The MBR comprises the first 512 bytes of a hard drive. Now that's bytes, not megabytes or even kilobytes. In our terabyte age, it's hard to appreciate how very small that is, but to give you an idea, at this point in the column, I've already written about three MBRs worth of text.

This 512-byte space then is split up into two smaller sections. The first 446 bytes of the MBR contain the boot code—code like the first stage of GRUB that allows you to load an operating system. The final 66 bytes contain a 64-byte partition table and a 2-byte signature at the very end. That partition table is full of information about the primary and extended partitions on a disk, such as at which cylinder they start, at which cylinder they end, what type of partition they are and other useful data you typically don't think much about after a disk is set up—at least, until it's gone.

This is the part of the column where I repeat some of the best disaster recovery advice I know—make backups. In this case, we are talking about MBR disasters, so here are a few ways to back up your MBR. After all, it's only 512 bytes; there's no reason why you can't afford to back it up. Heck, it's small enough to tattoo on your arm, except I guarantee once you do you'll end up migrating to a new system or changing the partition layout.

The best tool to back up the MBR is coincidentally the best tool at destroying it (more on that later), dd. In fact, dd is one of those ancient, powerful and blunt UNIX tools that blindly does whatever you tell it to, and it's adept at destroying all sorts of valuable data (more precisely, it's adept at following your explicit orders to destroy your valuable data). The following command backs up the MBR on the /dev/sda disk to a file named mbr_backup:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr_backup bs=512 count=1

Basically, this tells dd to read from /dev/sda 512 bytes at a time and output the result into mbr_backup, but to do only one 512-byte read. Now you can copy mbr_backup to another system or print it out and do the tattoo thing I mentioned before. Later on, if you were to wipe out your MBR, you could restore it (likely from some sort of rescue disk) with a slight twist on the above command. Simply swap the input and output sources:

$ sudo dd if=mbr_backup of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

There are a number of elaborate ways you can destroy some or all of your MBR. Please be careful with this first command. It actually deletes your MBR at the very least, and with a typo, it potentially could delete the entire disk, so step lightly. Let's start with the most blunt, dd:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

This command basically blanks out your MBR by overwriting it with zeros. Now, unless you are masochistic, or you are like me and used this in a demonstration of MBR recovery tools, you probably wouldn't ever run this command. Most people end up destroying part of their MBR in one of two ways: mistakes with bootloaders and mistakes with fdisk or other partitioning tools.

Mistakes with partitioning tools probably are the most common way people break their MBRs, or more specifically, their partition tables. It could be that you ran fdisk on sda when you meant to run it on sdb. It could be that you just made a mistake when resizing a partition, and after a reboot, it wouldn't mount. The important thing to keep in mind is that when you use partitioning tools, they typically update only the partition table on the drive. Even if you resize a drive, unless you tell a partitioning tool to reformat the drive with a fresh filesystem, the actual data on the drive doesn't change. All that has changed are those 64 bytes at the beginning of the drive that say where the partitions begin and end. So, if you make a partitioning mistake, your data is fine. You just have to reconstruct that partition table.

It would figure that the first time I really destroyed my MBR, it was through the second, less-common way—mistakes with bootloaders. In my case, it was a number of years ago, and I was struggling to get an early version of GRUB installed on a disk. After the standard command-line commands didn't work, I had the bright idea that maybe I could use the GRUB boot floppy image. After all, it was 512 bytes and so was my MBR, right? Well, it sort of worked. GRUB did appear; however, what I didn't realize was that in addition to writing GRUB over the first 446 bytes of my MBR, I also wrote over the last 66 bytes, my partition table. So although GRUB worked, it didn't see any partitions on the drive.