Fdisk Lt Slash Gt Mbr
| Field | MS-DOS Administration |
| Went Obsolete | Since the dawn of Windows 95 or at best 98 or then everyone use Linux/BSD and stop running dual boot due to virtual machines |
| Made Obsolete By | Windows9x>Settings>ComputerAdministration? |
| Knowledge Assumed | Knowing that a Master Boot Record is needed |
| When useful | When the system did not boot at all. Still used for uninstalling MBR-inhabiting boot loaders such as LILO or GRUB, or removing boot sector viruses |
It often happened that, for example after a virus infection via disk-swapping, your Master Boot Record was rendered unusable. Most people were not aware of the fact that MS-DOS's fdisk had an - undocumented? - feature of recreating the MBR simply by calling it with /mbr as parameter.
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This command is still used for repairing bootable Windows disks that are no longer bootable. It isn't really a lost skill, just an obscure one, but then it always was. As a PC technician in the 1990s I fixed quite a few 'dead' PCs? (very quickly) with this little command.
This utility is still used in linux when manually configuring partitions.
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This is not obsolete. What method has fixing a non-booting copy of XP that needs a new MBR has replaced it?
