Backing up the Master Boot Record and Partition Boot Sector

No operating system can protect itself from damage to these disk areas, which can be caused by viruses, faulty SCSI configurations, device driver problems, or power outages. You should back up the Master Boot Record on a disk every time you change partition information for primary partitions or an extended partition. You should back up a Partition Boot Sector when you format a volume, install Windows NT in the volume, or convert a volume from the FAT file system to the NTFS file system.

You can back up these disk sectors by using the Windows NT-based program, DiskProbe, or the MS-DOS-based program, DiskSave. Both of these utilities are on the Windows NT Server Resource Kit CD. The procedures for using DiskProbe and DiskSave are described in Chapter 7, "Disk, File System, and Backup Utilities."

If you have more than one hard disk, or more than one partition on a disk, you should back up every Master Boot Record and Partition Boot Sector. The Master Boot Record for the startup disk and the Partition Boot Sector for your system partition are the most critical. The ones for the other disks and volumes are not as critical to the startup process, but you might not be able to access files if the Master Boot Record for the disk or the Partition Boot Sector for the volume is not correct.

Chapter 6, "Troubleshooting Startup and Disk Problems," describes how to determine if you have a problem with one of these sectors.