I had a (very nearly) nasty little accident involving the bootsector on my /dev/sda1 (FAT32) yesterday. Basically, I've got a 3-way boot system, comprising Fedora, WinXP & Win98, with /dev/sda1 as the primary boot partition (C:), and the GRUB bootloader in the MBR on /dev/sda. The bootsector of /dev/sda1 contained the NT bootloader NTLDR startup code. At some point while using the SuSe 9 live CD, it somehow managed to bØrk the bootsector, and changed the bootsector code on /dev/sda1 from the NTLDR code, to a standard Win95/98 bootsector. Thus making it impossible to boot into WinXP (Win98 booted fine however). A bit of Googling later, revealed that I had to boot from the WinXP CD, press F10 to enter the recovery console, login as Administrator, and type FIXBOOT to restore the bootsector. OK so far, but in a fit of paranoia, I decided to backup both the MBR and the bootsector on sda1, with: dd if=/dev/sda of=disk1-MBR.img bs=512 count=1 dd if=/dev/sda1 of=disk1-part1-bootsector.img bs=512 count=1 Nothing wrong with that, except when I looked at disk1-MBR.img using hexedit, I saw this in the first 24 bits: .H....LILO.............? Where the hell did *that* come from? I have never used LILO on this disk ... ever? Further down, I see: ..}.0...}.*...GRUB And this correlates to /usr/share/grub/i386-redhat/stage1 which is identical to my MBR except for two areas ... the word "LILO" and further down the word "FLOPPY"? Should I worry about this? The system boots normally (all 3 OS's) but I'm concerned that I'm might be in for trouble later on? - K.
