Boot sector and partition table

[littlewill]

Recently I read an article saying that as long as you have a copy of the boot sector and partition table you have a good chance of getting your data back should things go a bit
Can anyone expand on this and how I can go about doing it. I am currently running XP Pro.
Thanks guys and girls
Littlewill

[EvilMunky]

Erm - a copy of the boot sector and the partition? what you mean like an image of the disk?

Im not sur ewhat your really asking mate - do you have a problem you need to solve or is it theoretical?

[directhex]

an ibm pc by definition has a boot table and partition table in order to work. the boot sector is the first 512 bytes of the disk surface, usually a pointer to another location on disk which has more information. the partiton table comes next, and it details how the disk is chopped up. there are two types of partition possible, primary and logical. logical partitions can exist only inside another primary partition (called extended for this purpose), and you can only have a maximum of four primary partitons (plus any number of logical ones) - so you could have three 10gb primary partitions, and an extended partition containing another ten logical partitions.

in the case of your system, more than likely the current setup is a single primary partition which fills all available space. the boot sector is a standard windows nt boot sector, which points to the program "ntldr" on the first windows partition on the drive. ntldr reads the file boot.ini on the same partition, andf provides a menu of different operating systems or settings to boot with (or just boots immediately if you only have one entry in boot.ini). a linux user may have LILO installed into the boot sector, or a pointer to GRUB, in a similar fashion.

so, after all the hard stuff, what does that mean? it means you already have a boot sector and partition table. what your article is saying is that if things go terribly terribly wrong, then if your partition structure is still intact, then your chances of data recovery are much greater than if the system loses the boundaries between partitions - in which case you're probably up a certain creek

[littlewill]

thanks all is now clear!

[littlewill]

It is purely theoretical and the kind dude below has answered. Thanks for both your replies !!!