To check whether an issue with my laptop’s in-line recording is a hardware problem or a buggy audio driver, the guy from Dell’s technical support asked me to install Windows to discard a software failure. I have been asked to do that after having the mainboard replaced (laptops have no separated sound cards). I have to decrease the size of one of my partitions, create a new one and format it as FAT32.
But the issue here is that Windows will rewrite the master boot record (to promote competition ;-)) when installing it.
I have asked how to restore the original MBR at Mandriva Expert and thanks to the replies, I have a method to copy and restore the MBR.
As administrator, run the following command:
dd if=/dev/sda of=mbrsave bs=512 count=1
To have it back, run as administrator again:
dd if=/path/to/mbrsave of=/dev/sda
Many thanks, George and Jean-Pierre, for the tip.
