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Questions tagged [mbr]

Master Boot Record (MBR) is a type of boot sector popularized by the IBM Personal Computer. It consists of a sequence of 512 bytes located at the first sector of a data storage device such as a hard disk.

From wikipedia

A master boot record (MBR) is a type of boot sector popularized by the IBM Personal Computer. It consists of a sequence of 512 bytes located at the first sector of a data storage device such as a hard disk. MBRs are usually placed on storage devices intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems.

The MBR may be used for one or more of the following:

  • Holding a partition table, which describes the partitions of a storage device. In this context the boot sector may also be called a partition sector.
  • Bootstrapping an operating system. The BIOS built into a PC-compatible computer loads the MBR from the storage device and passes execution to machine code instructions at the beginning of the MBR.
  • Uniquely identifying individual disk media, with a 32-bit disk signature, even though it may never be used by the operating system.

Because of the broad popularity of PC-compatible computers, the MBR format is widely used, to the extent of being supported by computer operating systems in addition to other pre-existing or cross-platform standards for bootstrapping and partitioning.[

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MBR status confusion

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Ahmed Ghoneim
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FreeBSD Install DVD changed pmbr to mbr leaving Mac OS X unbootable

Recently I was experimenting with FreeBSD 7.4 i386 Install DVD on a Mac mini Intel 2006 on whose harddisk Mac OS X 10.5.8 was installed. My aim was to just see contents of the harddisk from the FreeBSD's Live CD section to remember several concepts…
Terry
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Does master boot code change when installing new OS

MBR include 3 parts: Master boot code, Partition table and disk signature. For example, I install Windows first and after linux. I don't know master boot code depend on boot loader? (NTLDR or Grub2). When I install linux after windows, how does…
thanhtv
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How can I fix the MBR on my hard drive?

I've tried to use fixmbr (from the Windows XP Recovery Console) and pointed it to C:\, but broke it! Now I have: D:\Windows - with no ntldr C:\ - broken inaccessible partition with Grub and ntldr How can I repair C:\? (I only have Ubuntu)
all
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How to fix possibly wiped MBR after centOS install?

I think I have messed this one up royally... I have done a clean install of centOS 5.6 (x86_64) on my system. I got through the installation process successfully and rebooted. Now I am greeted with a blinking cursor on a black screen. No grub, no…
Hari Seldon
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Master Boot Record failure

We have failures at work on our compact flash drives where the MBR gets corrupted (zeroes written to its Sector 0). The CF cards are industrial grade, but are subject to high vibration/stress environments. It has not been duplicable in our own lab…
Crystal
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MBR 2TB LIMIT - TOTAL STORAGE OR PER DISC?

I´m a little confused about the MBR 2TB limit. Does it refer to the total storage of a system or only to the boot partition? Let´s say I have Windows 7 32bit installed on a 500GB disc in a primary partition and three discs of 1TB each formated as…
Walt
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Want to remove 2nd disk but MBR needs to be moved. How do I do it?

I have a laptop with two HD, the second one was added later. I had Windows Server 2008 installed on the first disk (0) and thn added the second disk (1). Next I installed Windows 7 on the second disk (1) and later removed Windows Server 2008. The…
Redeemed1
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Master Boot Record

I'm trying to understand what an MBR is. I know it is used to boot the device, like a compact flash card. If you had five 1GB CF card from SanDisk for a camera, would there be any reason for the manufacturer to have different MBRs? It seems like…
Crystal
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How can I know if my pc is 'MBR' or 'GBT'

when I want to install windows 10 on my pc, I burnt .ISO file on flash USB , as ' GPT ', but firstly my pc can not see it while installing windows, then I format it and burn it as 'MBR' , so that my pc saw it and I install windows 10. Questions :…
abdo
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Does the 2 terabyte limit for MBR apply to a partition or the entire disk?

This is really unclear from what I read. I have a 3TB secondary hard drive, but I want to install Windows 7 on that (for dual boot). I have an old BIOS so UEFI is not an option. I understand MBR only allows 2TB for boot partitions. So can I create a…
user576053
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Need copyied hard drive to be bootable

I copied all the contents of a hard drive to another. It wont boot of it though. I need it to. I deleted a partition and used a data recovery, The files i copied were the recovered ones. It recovered EVERY file.
Jacob Eggebeen
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