Fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR) from an USB drive

This page was born from the frustration of searching for a way of restoring the MBR on a notebook without a floppy drive when I had only a netbook without a CD-Rom drive. So I had to use an USB key to fix the notebook.

All the solutions out there did not really work or lack the crucial bit of information to adapt them to my case.

I encountered several problems with the fixes described on the net:

• I apparently had not installed the recovery console on my netbook and thus did not have access to the FIXMBR command that would run with a win98se boot stick (mbrfix does not run from a win98se bootdisk)
• this guy's fix is not for my problem
• The downloads at bootdisk.com mostly cost money and the page is a mess.

BTW, why is it that all these people out there writing guides for windows are completely unable to come up with readable pages?

At last, I ended up creating an ubuntu live usb key and fixing the mbr with that:

• create ubuntu live usb

• sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

As usual, Linux provides an elegant solution where windows just sucks.