Quote:
Originally Posted by BAN SUVS
So, as I sit here reformatting my old laptop drive, because the zero sector or whatever it's called failed, I had a thought. Why don't computers just backup the important sector in 2 or 3 other places on a given drive? It would take a totally insignificant percentage of the available storage size on current massive hard drives, and it sure would be handy if instead of the dreaded lost hard drive, your computer would jsut tell you "hey, your boot sector went dead. I'm running on the backup one now, but in the meantime you should back this crap up and get another drive in here."
Am I really the first one to think of this, or is there some obvious reason that I missed as to why it wouldn't work? Obviously it wouldn't help you if your drive physically crashes, but it eliminates one major source of isues with data, right?
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Answer me this: if the zero sector (aka the MBR "master boot record") is moved or backed up, how does the computer know where it is when it's starting? I guess you could write that info in the 0th sector and look it up during boot... oh wait, now you have the same problem.
I know, you could have a floppy disk or something that you back up the MBR on and if the drive takes an MBR dump, restore it off the bootable floppy. Oh wait, that was a feature on the original Norton Utilities, circa DOS 3.1.