1 Topic by lunix

  • lunix
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-03-10
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Add MBR restoral option to GParted

It would be helpful if GParted would allow a person to restore the Microsoft MBR when
one is working on a dual boot system so they can start over easily.  I know that legalities
are probably a show stopper.  However, one could potentially add a hook where the actual MBR is stored on a USB stick or another device that GParted accesses and in that way avoid any risk back to the development team as the individual user supplies that part.

I suppose it could be argued that this form of creeping featurism falls outside of the charter
for GParted but at times it would have saved me a lot of time and effort.

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-25
  • Posts: 2,376

Re: Add MBR restoral option to GParted

You are right on the "featurism"  wink
In fact, GParted is mostly related to gnu parted and a number of other free/open source tools related to the partition resizing and moving operations.
More features need much more development and maintenance effort. The GParted team is quite small, so much of the effort concerns bug fixes, support for newer hardware and software, and development of functionalities directly related to the resizing work.
We don't have to forget that GParted is used on many filesystems, partition table types, on single hard drives or RAID arrays.

This doesn't mean that new features are rejected. Some of them are added as long as there is time and free/O.S. software tools for them. Of course, work for such features by volunteers is always appreciated.


Restoring the boot functionality on a mswindows system is usually done from the recovery mode of the install cd/dvd of this operating system.
Information on the master boot sector and extended boot record structure can be found in the following pages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_boot_record
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_boot_record
Keeping backup of the M.B.R. can be dove with the dd command.
Restoring the M.B.R. is tricky, because we need to know well which part of the M.B.R. we want to restore: boot code area, disk ID, partition table.

In older GParted Live versions, a special tool was included, developped and offered by a member of this forum. This tool was able to dump contents of the M.B.R. or partition boot records to files. Unfortunately it didn't work in more recent livecd versions.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by biblio

  • biblio
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-04-21
  • Posts: 3

Re: Add MBR restoral option to GParted

lunix wrote:

It would be helpful if GParted would allow a person to restore the Microsoft MBR when
one is working on a dual boot system so they can start over easily.  I know that legalities
are probably a show stopper.  However, one could potentially add a hook where the actual MBR is stored on a USB stick or another device that GParted accesses and in that way avoid any risk back to the development team as the individual user supplies that part.

I suppose it could be argued that this form of creeping featurism falls outside of the charter
for GParted but at times it would have saved me a lot of time and effort.


I agree with this proposal

because I often experience the elimination of MBR, and it takes time to mengembalikannnya

and this suggestion will be very good and also help to facilitate the settlement of this issue