Linux Community Magazine

MBR or the Master Boot record is the first sector in a partitioned data storage device like hard drive. MBR is usually a 512 byte boot sector containing the primary partition table of the hard disk. In Linux system, MBR also stores the machine code instructions to be executed by the operating system after the BIOS passes the pointer to the machine code. Moreover, the MBR holds the unique 32-bit disk signature, which helps in identifying the disk drive and learn its information needed for booting. With all such necessary information in it, if due to any reason the MBR gets corrupted, all the data inside your Linux hard drive becomes completely inaccessible. Under such situations of data loss or inaccessibility, any Linux data recovery utility is of immense help to bring your valuable data back.

The Linux system fails to boot after any instance of corruption or damage to MBR, as the OS failed to fetch the partition table information. In Linux OS based computer system, you can access the MBR through 'dd' command. The 'dd' command is responsible for data backup, restoration and erasing of partition table. As the command gives very high level of authority over several things, it sometimes overwrite or corrupt the MBR.

Usually, such cases of MBR corruption is common in case of dual boot systems, where you have installed other operating systems like Windows along with Linux. The reasons behind MBR corruption can be anything, including virus/malware intrusion, unexpected system shut-down etc.

In order to resolve the system you need to repair the MBR. You can use the 'fsck' utility to scan the hard drive for possible corruptions and repair them as well. The 'fsck' is an inbuilt utility in Linux to check the disk for its consistency. However, sometimes, with severe corruption, 'fsck' fails to repair the disk and simply exits without doing nothing. If you are an advanced user, you can perform Linux Data Recovery by editing the MBR through any disk editor utility or provide the address of an alternate partition table.

However, by all the above means, if you fail to resolve the problem, you need to look for a valid backup to restore the data back. Failing to the same, you are left with a single option to format the hard drive and make a fresh installation of Linux. After that, you can run any Linux MBR Recovery software to recover the formatted data back.