Software for MBR in HDD

[Dreieck]

Hello everybody,

I am looking for a piece of software to manage the HDD. Especialy to edit/display/save/restore MBR. There is lots of free software on the internet, but non has a manual or tutorial. Which software designed for HDDs has a good and extensive manual? Is there any?

I'd like to have software (preferably free) with a good manual/instruction so that I could learn something new on how HDD works and know how to use the software.



thanks

PS
I tried MBR TOOL 2,2,100 but the menu is far from satisfactory and I couldn't find any manual to make things clear.

 

[Steevo]

You can fix the MBR in the windows repair console with "fixmbr"

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true

Or for Vista up use the recovery console, command prompt.

Bootrec.exe /fixmbr

No need to save it. Windows takes care of all of it already.

 

[Dreieck]

Yes, thanks. However, I am looking for a piece of software designed for HDDs with a good manual with it. I am doing so just to learn something new on HDD. How they work, what formatting is, where viruses can reside and so on...

Or maybe a book worth recommending? Does anyone know a book's name describing HDDs, but I mean the working knowledge, not just theoretical ...

 

[SaltyFish]

If you want to learn about the Master Boot Record, have you tried reading the Wikipedia article on it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

If you're going to play with the MBR, you might as well understand it first. I think most programs that touch the MBR assume the user knows something about MBR so any help manual they offer will only explain what the program does but not the how or the why.

 

[Steevo]

Yes, thanks. However, I am looking for a piece of software designed for HDDs with a good manual with it. I am doing so just to learn something new on HDD. How they work, what formatting is, where viruses can reside and so on...

Or maybe a book worth recommending? Does anyone know a book's name describing HDDs, but I mean the working knowledge, not just theoretical ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INT_13H


Start at the beginning when we had to know tracks, heads, cylinders and had to use jumpers on drives to make them work. Back when the CPU and BIOS was used with the info to perform reads and writes, and that still exists. Get a old hard drive, install a virtual copy of windows 95 or 98 onto it and then use a hex editor to read the byte address where the data begins, then learn to write a new jump address but only after you load a small intercept and copy file that writes back all the calls to disk. Some newer systems may not allow this low level access, or you may have to turn off protection in the BIOS, or just find a old system to perform this on, and then pop the drive into a computer to see your work.

Read up on MFT and how its mostly empty space and metadata is still just junk to most operating systems, or a miserable way to create another search index file that clogs up the systems resources. ADS Alternate Data Streams, Big and Little Endian, unsecured byte addressing made easier by huge drives, how to hide small bits of files in left over segments of unused sectors, or how to inflate a file and inject another file into it.


Working knowledge of HDD's, I am assuming you want to know more about the file structures and not the physical way that data is stored, that is either A) Easily found and understood with magnetic, optical, or electrical bits, or B) Proprietary to drive manufacturer, but mostly still common knowledge.

For the actual working of FAT in all its iterations, and NTFS, and the many other types of formats used by *nix systems check your local library, or the IBM resource library online, they have an amazing amount of information written and available for free.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoc...opic=/com.ibm.cluster.gpfs.doc/gpfsbooks.html

I just typed in IBM docs boulder in Google.