Help! I need to change my MBR to Leopard HDD!

[andyfox]

Dear Friends,

 

Here is my situation: I have a laptop with 2 HDDs. The first drive contains Vista, and Ubuntu, and also my MBR. The second my OSX installation. I have to pull the first drive tomorrow because I have a friend in need of a hard disk for a laptop. The question is, How can I change the MBR or create a new MBR or some type of booting record on the 2nd HDD with my Leopard. I know from experience that when i pull the first drive the computer will tell me "no operating system found". I just want to keep all of my info and have no way to back it up. I could do a new install but all of my info would be wiped clean. Please help me guys, theres gotta be a way.. i hope.

 

Thanks for your help :censored2:

[David Fiore]

you can copy the mbr from one drive to the other with the dd command from linux or mac, but that will give you a MBR for Vista / Ubuntu and OSX, which will also be in correct as you will be missing 2 drives from the list.

Example (note you need to change if=/dev/sda to your input drive and of=/dev/sdb to your output drive)

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1

 

I believe your best bet is to use OSX86Tools to install EFI onto the drive. Im not terribly familiar with OSX86Tools, having only used it to replace EFI_V8 with Chameleon on my GF's PC.

 

I think you need to ensure you have a GUID partitioned OSX drive and it should be painless.

 

Dave