Does Toshiba Reinstal rewrite boot sector?

WinXP reinstal process from Toshiba (Satellite 1900) system
CDs has only the briefest documentation, that warns the user
the process reformats the hard drive beforehand.

Can any Toshiba maven confirm that the reinstal process
also rewrites the boot sector (so that my GRUB for Linux
on the other partition will be lost) ?

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

Don Phillipson wrote on Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:31:27 -0500:
> WinXP reinstal process from Toshiba (Satellite 1900) system
> CDs has only the briefest documentation, that warns the user
> the process reformats the hard drive beforehand.
>
> Can any Toshiba maven confirm that the reinstal process
> also rewrites the boot sector (so that my GRUB for Linux
> on the other partition will be lost) ?

I can't say with 100% certainly, but I believe it does. You can use lots
of programs to save the boot sector first. Don't save the last part of
the boot sector though. Well you can as long as you don't change the
partition info. As that is also on the later part of the boot sector.

--
Bill
Asus EEE PC 702G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC
Xandros Linux (build 2007-10-19 13:03)

Don Phillipson wrote:
> WinXP reinstal process from Toshiba (Satellite 1900) system
> CDs has only the briefest documentation, that warns the user
> the process reformats the hard drive beforehand.
>
> Can any Toshiba maven confirm that the reinstal process
> also rewrites the boot sector (so that my GRUB for Linux
> on the other partition will be lost) ?

The Toshiba restore disk will reformat your entire drive. This means
that you would lose the Linux partition as well. In effect this means
it would put the laptop in the same state as it was when you took it out
of the box and used it for the first time.

So what problems are you having with WinXP that makes you think a
reinstallation is required to fix it?

--

Roy Smith
Windows XP Pro SP3



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The answer could be model specific, but generally, yes, they do.


Don Phillipson wrote:
> WinXP reinstal process from Toshiba (Satellite 1900) system
> CDs has only the briefest documentation, that warns the user
> the process reformats the hard drive beforehand.
>
> Can any Toshiba maven confirm that the reinstal process
> also rewrites the boot sector (so that my GRUB for Linux
> on the other partition will be lost) ?
>